


et les mots croisés

by toomuchplor



Series: Eamespreg [1]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Casual Sex, Genderbending, Genderqueer, Lactation, Lactation Kink, M/M, Mpreg, Pregnant Sex, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-01
Updated: 2013-07-27
Packaged: 2017-11-17 13:28:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 39,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/552061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toomuchplor/pseuds/toomuchplor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes you can be working at cross-purposes and still find yourselves intersecting at just the right angle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Wow, okay. Every time I go to write mpreg I do a bit of a cop-out because it's this nerve-wracking tightrope act of denying biology, history, and pretty much all common sense -- but this time I seem to be balancing and wobbling my way across that highwire. So: some brief explanations of our logic for the biology in the end-notes if you're like me and cannot stop wondering about the whys and wherefores.
> 
> With thanks to anat for audiencing, and to xen for basically co-writing this in every way except for putting the actual words on the screen. She is my plot mastermind, though it's totally my fault if it comes out wrong, okay? I texted her saying "Thinking about girl!Eames baby fic" and she said "no, mpreg!Eames" and then we talked about it for about one million hours until this fic happened.
> 
> Contains high levels of cluelessness (for comedic effect) and a definite dose of 'they don't know they're an OTP okay' though as this is my fic you know it'll all come out in the wash, right? Oh, and possibly toxic levels of schmoop, eventually.

It's not fair of Arthur to say it: "The best part is how you sound all confused, like you're normally so fucking diligent, keeping track of your personal life." 

Because, yes, Eames might be a bit of a bohemian, but he's not a _madman_. He doesn’t dogear pages in books, for example; he uses bookmarks like any civilised person. Eames rinses his plates before stacking them in the dishwasher, when there _are_ plates and a dishwasher rather than the more usual takeaway cartons and plastic forks or bamboo chopsticks. Eames flosses, most nights. He even has a bloody sodding dayplanner (somewhere) with the proper year on it, though admittedly it doesn’t contain too many details of his various engagements and appointments. It wouldn't do to leave a paper trail, after all. Anyone could nick it, and then where would Eames be?

"Oh, top secret information, is it," Arthur says, grinning in a terrible superior way, "how often you cycle per year, that's, like — on a need-to-know basis?"

"Three times!" Eames shoots back, irritably. "Mostly it's thrice per annum, thank you."

Arthur shifts in his chair lazily, bored, recrosses his legs. He looks amused and laconic and fucking annoyingly attractive in his pinstriped trousers and burgundy sweater vest and charcoal tie. "Well, jet lag can fuck you up, sometimes," he says, his token comfort far worse than his outright mockery. "I mean, not me. But I've heard it can."

"Oh, yes, you're above such fucking things," Eames mutters darkly, and then they've got to shelve the topic of Eames, his possibly-missing-in-action cycle, and his probable state of hormonal bitchiness as his body does its level best to catch up again — because here's the extractor, Reas. She’s got her felt pen uncapped and the flip chart set up, ready to attack the problem of how best to get round the mark. 

Eames slouches down in his chair and folds his arms over his chest, scowling, ignoring the easy way Arthur shifts over into his professional work-mode. 

Clockwork Arthur: sod him.

***

Eames doesn't think about it again until two days have passed. 

He’s doing some work for the job, hunched over his drafting table and painstakingly slicing a piece of cardstock with an x-acto blade. Arthur crosses the floor behind him, a momentary background distraction, there and gone in the periphery of Eames' vision — until, suddenly, he reappears. Hovers.

"What," Eames says flatly, not looking up from his work. Normally, he knows, he would straighten up and smile and purr _yes, my sweet Arthur, how may I be of assistance?_ , but Eames is still irritable and tense and waiting for his body to cooperate at long last. He’s in no mood for idle workplace chatter.

"Reas went out," Arthur says, like that means something.

Eames grunts and uses the angled point of the knife to lever the paper strip out of the sheet, careful not to breathe too hard because it's a vanishingly small strip of text and he's fucked it up twice already this morning.

"Eames," says Arthur.

"What," Eames says again, balancing the strip on the blade, moving it carefully over to the bank slip he's forging. Bloody archival work, it's like the nineties on this job, all rubber glue and eraser dust and delicate eye-straining close-up — 

Arthur's hand is a warm shock, gliding with flat palm over Eames' collarbone and down the center of his chest, Arthur behind Eames now, having closed in when Eames was busy focussing on the work in front of him. Eames goes rigid with surprise but, thank christ, he doesn't wriggle, doesn't lose the strip of paper. 

"Reas," Arthur says again, low and breathy and teasing, "went. Out."

Oh, thinks Eames. _Oh_. Well. Not chatter, but something altogether more purposeful, and Eames might be hormonal as fuck right now, but he’s not _dead_ inside.

But then Arthur's fingers drag over and unerringly find a nipple, pinching _hard_ , and it _hurts_ , and abruptly everything goes wrong all at once. Eames chokes back a yelp, and slaps Arthur’s hand away reflexively. The buggering tiny piece of paper, unseated from the x-acto blade, flutters off god knows where — third one today god _dammit_. And at the same moment, Arthur leaps back with a (decidedly unmuffled) yelp of his own, following it up with, “Ouch, jesus fuck, Eames!”

When Eames twists round to see what he’s fussing about, ready to do a bit of his own shouting and cursing over the bloody horrible work Arthur’s just forced him to start again, Arthur’s sucking on the junction of thumb and index finger, dark-eyed and wounded of expression. “You stabbed me, asshole!” he says, the words a bit garbled around his hand.

"You started it with your," Eames blasts back, holding up both hands and making lewd _honka-honka_ motions with his fingers. "What the hell was that? Warn a bloke before you go medieval on his tits, you sadistic”— 

—“Come on, I barely touched you, jesus”— 

—“Would you and your libido _kindly_ exit the workspace while I try and accomplish something?" Eames bellows over Arthur’s protestations. "We can't all have jobs that could be ably accomplished by any twelve-year-old with an iPhone and a 3G connection."

Arthur huffs and his eyes go wide. He’s visibly at a loss for a comeback for a long satisfying series of seconds. Finally he holds his hands up and backs away, shaking his head. "Right," he says, "if you need me, I'll be over in this corner using my _iPhone_ and my _3G connection_ to research drug interactions between midol and somnacin."

Eames raises his index and middle finger in salute. "God be with you," he says, "be sure to update your Facebook status to that effect, hmm?"

"Right," says Arthur, and as he stalks off, Eames can hear Arthur saying, "as if anyone's on _Facebook_ anymore, fuck."

***

Eames thinks he can make the leap from his hotel balcony to Arthur's, probably. It's three feet, a doddle in a dreamscape, scarcely more than a hop even up here in the real world. He gets a foot up on the railing, grabs onto the brick face of the building's wall, starts to pull himself up, and is abruptly just _wearied_ by the whole effort. He lets go of the brick and pulls his foot back to the cement balcony floor with a thud. "Arthur!" he bellows instead. "Arthur!"

Arthur comes out onto his balcony in his shirtsleeves, clingy little pants, and a scowl. "We have phones, Eames," he says. "We have email. Christ, send me a tweet."

"I was already out here," Eames says sensibly. "Come over, hmm?"

"It's three in the morning," Arthur points out.

"You're awake," Eames answers. "As am I."

Arthur hesitates visibly and drops the scowl a little. “I thought you were still pissed about the," he says, and mimes an air-squeeze.

"Are you actually arguing about getting laid right now," Eames half-asks, flopping back into the cheap plastic reclining chair that comprises the hotel balcony furniture.

Arthur folds his arms over his chest and quirks his mouth, considering. "Do I get to go on top?" he bargains.

"On top of my dick?" Eames clarifies brightly, tilting a smile Arthur’s way. He splays his knees apart and lifts his hips in invitation. It sounds good, though, either way: Arthur on top, doing all the work, Eames just lying there and letting the sex happen to him, letting Arthur make him come however he wants.

Arthur thumbs the stubble on his chin as he ponders Eames' offer, like he's actually putting serious thought into it, standing out in the warm California night air in his unbuttoned oxford and indecently tight briefs. "Yeah," he says, "okay. But you have to get me off, some asshole stabbed me in my fapping hand this morning."

"You've never done it like a lefty?" Eames asks, because as pleasurable as it usually is, wanking Arthur off, it sounds dangerously like work to him in his current lazy state. He lifts his own left hand and sketches a few strokes midair. "It's fantastic, you ought to try it. Just a bit clumsy and wrong, like getting tossed off by a nubile virgin.”

Arthur snorts, coaxed into something approaching good humour by the promise of sex. He doesn't make a bit of a fuss over the distance, just steps up onto his balcony's railing and walks to Eames' like it really is just as sane as going round by the corridor. He lands, light on his feet as always, swings one tight long thigh across Eames' lap as he settles down, strokes hands — gentle hands, Eames notes with pleasure — up inside Eames' belted silk dressing gown. "Been working out," he says appreciatively, bowing his dark head to kiss the side of Eames' neck. "You always have nice pecs but holy shit, Eames. These are fucking amazing.”

Eames lolls his head to the side and exhales, slow and dreamy and yet more languid now he's got Arthur over him, on him. Ten minutes ago he felt so different, lurching up out of a dissatisfying dream with sweat rolling down his back, cock hard, heart pounding and mouth dry. Arthur's touch is like balm all over Eames' skin, a cool respite from the way Eames feels lately: swollen and taut and on the edge of misery at every moment. He's never had such bad symptoms, pre-cycle; but then, he's never gone so long past due in his adult life either. It's probably jet lag, after all. Eames has been living on planes, lately. He hardly knows what time it is now, let alone what month, what season. All he knows is the soft cool slip of Arthur’s perfect fingers over his chest and sides and shoulders, sweet and easy and familiar. Eames’ eyelids start to droop, helplessly.

"You're not going to fall asleep before you fuck me," Arthur warns Eames, noticing. "Did you bring lube and condoms out here at least?"

"Pocket," Eames says muzzily, for all he's still half-hard under Arthur's thigh. "Other pocket," he redirects.

"There's only lube," Arthur says, "Eames."

"S'fine," says Eames, "you're on the pill, aren't you? Besides, I'm probably shooting blanks in this state. And you know Reas has our tests going back months, she's mad about the possibility of PASIV-transmitted, ah — ah, Arthur" 

It’s heaven, that cool gentle grip circling Eames’ bare cock, working him slowly for a few moments before Arthur clambers up onto his knees and wriggles out of his pants and shirt. 

“You've got lovely big hands, I'm very sorry I accidentally stabbed one of them,” Eames says, watching through half-closed eyes.

"You can make it up to me in a while," Arthur says, reaching round behind himself now, working himself open quick and easy and wonderfully slutty, left-handed no less. "You know, you're taking a lot on faith here just for the sake of getting to put it to me bare."

"Nnn, yes, talk dirty to me," Eames says, rousing himself to steady Arthur by the hips, encourage him up and over and then down, down, into Eames' lap. "Tell me more about how I'm built like an Adonis and you're desperate for me to fill you up with my manly seed, you — shit, shit, that's it, Arthur, you're a wonder."

Arthur _is_ a wonder, he is, he really is, riding Eames like they're not scraping awkwardly across the cement floor on a bendy white plastic chair, like they're not bleary-eyed and tired from the job that Reas is running on the world's tightest extraction schedule. Arthur pins Eames against the chair back with his splayed palm and rolls his hips down into Eames' and makes filthy perfect hungry noises. It's a terrible angle, this, Eames can only go so deep and no deeper, but it doesn't matter because he's suddenly on the edge just from the spectacle of Arthur teasing himself with Eames' cock, Arthur with loose messy bedhead and open mouth and sticky-tipped cock flexing between their bellies. 

"Ugh, this sucks, hang on," Arthur says, less enamoured of the position than Eames, apparently. He clambers off the chair and tugs Eames up after him, shoves Eames roughly into the hotel room and tumbles him to the bed. "Better, that's better," Arthur says smugly, and commences to make the mattress squeak and shiver, the crappy hotel bed headboard crack and thump. "Sorry, fuck," Arthur mutters, and it's only then that Eames realizes Arthur was rubbing Eames' chest again as he rode him, that Eames brushed Arthur's hands away unthinkingly because it _hurt_ , it bloody — "they're just so fucking big right now, I — god, god, I'm seriously going to come in a second, how are you?"

Eames answers the question by lifting his hips off the bed and thrusting fast and shallow into Arthur, spilling.

"Feels good, I know, I know," Arthur says, going all sweet and dimpled as he only does when he makes Eames come. He gentles Eames down, pulls off and clambers forward, up the landscape of Eames' body. "Can I come on them? Won't hurt."

"Yeah, have at 'em," Eames says drowsily, magnanimously, even though he's pretty sure it's weird that Arthur's so fucking into Eames' pecs. Whatever Arthur likes to say, they certainly aren't the result of time spent in the gym. More like time spent in the chippy, Eames thinks, drifting off to the weirdly soporific soft sound of Arthur getting himself off a bit unevenly, left-handed. They're kebab-and-pasty-pecs, not bench-press-and-sweat pecs. They're — so sore, that's odd, that's not something that — 

"Yeah, yeah, I’m,” grates out Arthur, and then there's the warm-lovely-quick patter of come over Eames' chest, the yet-more-lovely sound of Arthur gasping and half-laughing and finishing off with the sweet soft serious noise he makes when he resigns himself to the fact that there's no more pleasure to be wrung from this particular orgasm. "Shit, that looks hot on your ink," Arthur is saying, and he's smearing it around messily which is going to be terrible in the morning, but Eames is drifting properly now, pleased and sated and utterly incapable of kissing Arthur back no matter how ardently Arthur is kissing Eames' mouth.

***

Eames has strange and unsettling dreams.

“Strange and unsettling how?” asks Arthur, who is not a morning person but does a shockingly good impression of one, buttoned up and neat and not at all looking like the bloke who slipped out of Eames’ hotel room and back to his own in the pink light of dawn. Scarcely an hour has passed, and here Arthur is looking like he’s been starched and ironed.

Eames, for his part, scarcely feels like he slept at all, hasn’t shaved, and is wearing yesterday’s trousers, yesterday’s socks. Dressing felt like too much trouble once he’d spent ten minutes in the shower scraping dried come out of his chest hair, wincing through the necessary pressure of fingertips to his sore pectoral muscles. Besides, nothing in Eames’ suitcase seems to hang properly on him at the moment, except maybe these trousers. 

“Well, to begin with,” Eames says, reaching over to paw through the fruit bowl Reas keeps stocked, “I dreamt.”

Arthur blinks, catching Eames’ meaning now. “How long since, you, ah,” he begins to ask, almost delicate about it. It’s a bit incongruent with the Arthur who woke Eames this morning by pinching Eames’ sides and saying, _I like these, gives me something to hold onto while you fuck me_. But Arthur’s a different creature when he’s got coffee in his hands rather than Eames’ nascent love handles, sleek pomaded hair rather than tousled pre-shower curls. And besides all that, Arthur credits himself with a certain level of professionalism when it comes to somnacin side effects. On jobs like these where there’s no dedicated chemist, it’s Arthur’s task to mete out the dosages and keep tabs on how everyone manages the drugs in their system.

“Oh, I dream now and then, between gigs,” Eames says, choosing a small mandarin orange. He pushes the curve of his index fingernail into the top of the fruit, teasing the peel away. The flesh is overripe, almost, and gives up a little squirt of juice when he presses too hard. “But never when I’m working.”

Arthur frowns and takes a sip of coffee. “You haven’t been under much, yet,” he says. “We’ve kept you busy with the documents.”

“Probably that’s it,” Eames agrees, and strips away the last bit of peel, holds it up. “Elephant,” he says, and flaps the orange peel ears by way of illustration.

Arthur — still not a morning person — doesn’t bother to smile or even roll his eyes. He just stifles a yawn and gets out his phone, probably making a note to look into the dreaming situation later on once he’s properly awake. The phone makes little clicking noises, like an insect, as Arthur taps the screen expertly.

“I was doing my taxes,” Eames says, because the phone reminds him of the adding machine he’d been using in his dream.

“That’s what passes for strange and unsettling in Eames’ world?” Arthur asks, distracted.

There’s nothing so boring as other people’s dreams. Eames of all people knows this. He decides against telling Arthur the rest: how his teeth fell out, how he’d spent hours trying to find a lost tie, and how when he’d woken up with Arthur’s hands stroking up his sides, Eames thought it was part of the dream, too. He shakes the feeling away and reaches for a banana, pushes the peeled orange towards Arthur across the table. Eames has had terrible heartburn the last few weeks; best avoid the acid, he reckons.

Arthur takes the mandarin and breaks it into sections, makes short work of it, and neglects to say thank you or even break eye contact with his screen: definitely not a morning person, no, though he fakes it well.

***

The next two days are nothing but hours of work. Eames finishes the archival documents he’s forging, working late into the night to get them done. Then there’s the tiresome business of planting them in the company’s records. This involves wearing a suit and tie, weaselling his way into the company’s headquarters, and chatting up three separate administrative drones. Being charming has never felt so dreadfully dull. 

But Eames makes the plant, barely, and escapes to the circus of food carts a few blocks away, joins the hordes of office workers feeling cosmopolitan as they gnaw at different flavours of curry wrapped in different kinds of flatbread.

“Cheesecake for lunch?” Arthur half-asks, coming over and sitting next to Eames on a concrete flower-bed edge. He’s got a plastic tray with salad in it, leafy greens topped with purple-red shredded beets and corn. It looks disgusting.

“Is that balsamic vinegar?” Eames asks, taking the plastic cup of dressing from Arthur’s tray, popping it open, drizzling it over his cheesecake.

Arthur makes the sort of gagging noise Eames didn’t make at Arthur’s own questionable lunch choices. “Eames,” he protests.

“You never use the dressing,” Eames says. “Balsamic vinegar is the new foodie dessert flavour of choice, anyway.”

“On lime cheesecake,” Arthur doesn’t ask, flatly.

“It’s pistachio,” Eames corrects, indignant. “Don’t be mad.”

“Look, I only came over to see if you made the plant,” Arthur says, stabbing at his salad, “not to have you destroy my appetite.”

“Plant made,” Eames says. “And I need you to take me clothes shopping, darling, since you’re so fond of my newfound bulk. I feel like the inside of a boiled egg in this suit, I’m bursting out of it.”

“Well, cheesecake is hardly,” Arthur begins, and stops judiciously when Eames looks over at him pointedly. “I would love to take you shopping,” he revises mildly, “so long as you promise to try everything on before you reject it out of hand. And — no tweed. Or linen.”

“I’d just be pleased with a belt that’s not cutting me in two,” Eames says, groaning, eating more cheesecake anyway.

“I think you should talk to Yusuf, after this job,” Arthur says with a thoughtful frown. “If you’re still not cycling, and gaining weight, and — I mean, clearly your taste buds have stopped working. Plus, the dreaming.”

“I’ve got terminal cancer, probably, is what you mean,” Eames says gloomily. “Cheers, Arthur, you really know how to ruin a good slice of cheesecake.” He slides the last piece onto the fork and frowns at it: dull green cake splotched with dark brown, like camouflage dessert. Wouldn’t do to let it go to waste, though. Eames downs it: more fuel for his malignant tumour.

“If I thought you had cancer, I’d suggest a doctor, not Yusuf,” Arthur says. “Probably it’s a — what do they call it? — an atypical drug reaction. You might have to switch formulations, that’s all.”

Eames reaches over and takes a forkful of beets off Arthur’s tray, still ravenous in spite of his probable impending death. “I’m done for the day, anyhow,” he says, “fancy a long afternoon shag?”

Arthur, who opened his mouth to protest Eames’ food thievery, quite visibly shifts moods with this suggestion, straightening up a little and losing all interest in his lunch. “Yeah,” he says, “yeah, okay. Let me just text Reas that I’ll come in to finish my file on the mark’s sister later.”

Eames holds Arthur’s salad while Arthur texts, and eats most of it by way of punishment when Arthur’s single text spirals into a long exchange with Reas that would probably take a fraction of the time if either of them ever used their phones for actual verbal conversations.

“Okay,” says Arthur at long last, “let’s go.”

Eames heaves himself up and groans at the cut of his leather belt across his middle, the tug of his suit jacket over his chest and shoulders. He’s desperate to be out of these clothes, and better yet if that happens with Arthur beside him, similarly naked.

***

It’s the sound of Om Nom happily crunching through a candy that pulls Eames up from sleep. He slowly rolls onto his back and kicks at the blanket tangled up round his legs, the one that wasn’t there when he flopped onto the bed and beckoned Arthur follow only minutes earlier.

Only it couldn’t have been minutes, because the sun’s setting now, Eames is stiff and bleary-eyed, and Arthur’s dressed again. He’s wearing jeans and a long-sleeved thermal tee, his hair loose and feet bare. Arthur’s clearly settled in for the duration with his iPad on his bent knees, working steadily and ably through levels of Cut the Rope.

“Did we have really nice sex and I missed it?” Eames asks, squirming closer to Arthur.

“I actually did blow you for about a minute before I noticed you snoring,” Arthur says, but there’s more amusement in his voice than annoyance. He looks over at Eames and quirks his mouth. “You’ve been working too hard. I texted Reas and told her we have to add three days to the timeline or we’re both walking.”

“And?” Eames prompts, nudging his cheek up onto Arthur’s hip, hoping for a bit of head-scratching.

Arthur’s fingers settle in Eames’ hair and stroke it up and down, delightful and soft and perfect. “And she caved,” he says, “but your per diem went down a little. And I threw in an extra tune-up on her PASIV, that thing’s teetering on the brink of system failure already.”

“You’d have done it anyway,” Eames says, blissful with the gentle tickle of Arthur’s hand over his scalp. “You’d never pull a job on a substandard machine.”

“Reas doesn’t know that,” Arthur says quietly, getting back to his game with his free hand. “You want to sleep more? Should I go?”

“Don’t want to sleep more,” Eames says, though he could honestly go straight back under if he let himself, especially with the warmth of Arthur under his cheek, Arthur stroking his head, Arthur breathing soft and steady and tapping the iPad’s screen beside him. “I believe I owe you at least one minute of fellatio, anyway.” He pushes his head over until he’s nearer Arthur’s fly, drops his palm flat over the soft bulk of Arthur’s cock and gives it a friendly gentle squeeze.

Arthur sets the iPad on the nightstand and unbuttons his jeans obligingly. “You were dreaming again, I think,” he says, lifting his hips and pushing his jeans and pants down when Eames shifts back to allow it. “You were making little noises.”

“Chasing rabbits,” Eames says knowingly as he settles properly between Arthur’s spread legs now, noses up alongside Arthur’s soft cock. He likes this, taking Arthur from zero to coming; usually they’re in a hurry, or already worked up from some feat of dering-do. There’s something particularly nice about having the leisure to kiss Arthur before he’s quite ready for it, Arthur who’s nearly always up for sex, literally and figuratively.

“Sorry,” murmurs Arthur, “just — keep going.”

No way to reassure a bloke that you like his soft cock just fine, thanks, so Eames fills his mouth to keep it busy, sucking on Arthur’s cock head and taking all Arthur’s length in, so easily. Arthur draws a sharp breath in through his nose and twists at Eames’ hair, pleased. Eames can count the heartbeats it takes under his tongue, the bump-bump-bump here along the long vein as Arthur’s cock thickens first and starts to harden with Eames’ gentle sucking and bobbing. Above him, Arthur’s his usual noisy filthy self, half-spoken phrases of encouragement mixed with promises that might be shocking if Eames didn’t know perfectly well that Arthur’s barely aware he’s saying them at all. There’s no mistaking it when Arthur’s awake, that much is certain. Even the rough tug of his fingers on Eames’ hair, ears, jaw, would be ample proof.

But then Arthur’s hands leave for a moment, and when they come back they’re dropping the bottle of lube onto Eames’ face. “Fuck, sorry,” Arthur says, half-laughing, half-gasping, “but can you — I want your fingers.”

Eames pulls off with a noisy sucking sound, just because Arthur pretends to hate that noise even as the leap and freshly wet tip of his cock makes him a liar. “You want to come like this?” Eames checks, getting the bottle in his hand and popping the cap. Arthur’s still got his t-shirt on, and his spit-wet cock is curved up over the hem of it, leaving a dark trail of damp. Eames wouldn’t mind seeing that neat Calvin Klein stretch of fabric even more sullied, patchy and white-wet and filthy with Arthur’s come.

“Yeah, okay,” Arthur says, “will you still fuck me, after? You’re not too tired?”

Eames tucks a finger into Arthur’s arse and comes up to kiss him, lovely solicitous Arthur who thinks Eames is working too hard and that he probably doesn’t have terminal cancer, whose hands are gliding down Eames’ chest and over to his sides to pinch gently at the bulk there. _Something to hold onto,_ Eames remembers, smiling against Arthur’s mouth. “Oh, I’ll fuck you,” Eames tells him, “press you down into the mattress and fuck you for hours if you like. But first,” and he moves back down, pushes another finger in, and takes Arthur in his mouth.

“I liked this shirt,” Arthur says, somewhere between regret and satisfaction, when Eames finishes making him come a while later. Arthur’s got pink cheeks now, sweat on his brow, and jumpy sweet thigh muscles jittering with aftershocks even as Eames keeps pushing more lube into him, using the laxity of orgasm to open Arthur a bit more.

“It’ll wash,” Eames says, rolling Arthur onto his side and coming up to spoon behind him.

“I can’t put this in the hotel laundry,” Arthur says, scandalized, like he didn’t just make the hotel corridors ring with his urgent shouting as he fucked into Eames’ mouth.

“Take it home?” Eames suggests, pushing Arthur’s uppermost thigh up to better expose his wet arsehole. “Oh, sweetheart, look at this, I’m going to fuck you all night.”

“I told Reas I’d come into work, later,” Arthur says, straining up to see the bedside alarm clock. “You can fuck me until 6:35.”

“I’m going to fuck you until 6:35,” Eames revises easily, swiping some lube over his cock.

“Oh, but I’ll need to shower,” Arthur says, “and grab some dinner. Probably — 5:50, actually.”

“I’m going to fuck you until 5:50,” Eames says, and lines himself up, pushes in. It’s delightfully easy, Arthur loose from coming around Eames’ fingers, nothing between them but the thin slick of lube. “Oh, Arthur,” Eames says, and pushes his forehead to the nape of Arthur’s neck, thrusts in fully.

“I don’t have laundry at home,” Arthur says.

“Hmm,” Eames says, trying for polite interest when he’s actually trying to work out how he’ll last until 5:50 with Arthur so slick and hot and perfect around him.

“I don’t actually have a home, really,” Arthur adds, and curves an arm back around Eames’ neck, makes a thrilling series of soft sounds before holding Eames steady for kissing. “Not that I’m homeless,” he adds when he regains his calm a little, “just that I stopped trying to maintain a base of operations when I realized it was more economical to — fuck, oh my god, Eames, this position is really — ah, deep, yes, there.”

“Economical,” Eames prompts him, because it’s helping, actually, listening to Arthur natter on about his budgeting. He moves his upper body a little and pushes Arthur’s down under him, trying for a different angle, wanting to go as deep as Arthur needs.

“Hotel laundry is expensive,” Arthur says, face a bit muffled now by the pillow, “but it’s a relatively small expense when you’re not paying rent or utilities. Plus — plus,” and now he’s pushing his mouth into the bed himself, and his brow’s gone all creased and his eyes are squeezed tight, which is the way Arthur looks when his busy massive brain has been taken utterly offline through steady and insistent application of Eames’ cock in his arse.

Eames pushes two fingers into Arthur’s mouth to help him, and fucks him for a while like that, keeping a weather eye on the clock. 5:43, 5:45, 5:46, and it’s no good, Eames is — he drops back again and pulls his hand free, cinches an arm round Arthur’s hips and holds him steady. Eames fucks into him inelegantly, frantically, abruptly desperate to come. Arthur’s eyes pop open and he grins like he gets it, says, “Come on, Eames, fucking — yeah, come, do it, I want to feel you filling me up,” and Eames grits his teeth and digs his fingers into Arthur’s hip and lets himself go spectacularly.

“Ow,” says Arthur, a moment later, but he’s laughing too. “Ow, holy fuck, you’re kind of a fucking — animal right now.” He rolls away and sits up, looking down to inspect the red handprint on his hip. “It’s a good thing I’m not the one with the too-tight clothes,” he says. He looks back up and takes Eames in, sprawled half on his stomach and taking up more than his fair share of the bed. “You look wrecked.”

“I look like a fat-arse who’s too off form to shag you properly,” Eames says bitterly, not moving.

“Oh, that was perfectly up to standard,” Arthur assures him, beaming. “Any more up to standard and I’d be limping tomorrow, thanks.” He looks down at his t-shirt and frowns again, strips it over his head. “Sleep it off, babe,” he says, leaning in to kiss Eames’ eyebrow, “I’ve got to run.”

Eames shouldn’t go to sleep, of course; he’ll only wake disgustingly early and then his internal clock will be even more fucked than it already is. At this rate he’ll never cycle, he’ll spend all of eternity like this: bloated and spent and sprawled over a mattress.

“Hey,” Arthur says very softly into Eames’ ear, some minutes later. He smells like shower gel, like Eames’ shampoo — on his way out the door, Eames surmises blearily. “Hey, I’m going to call Yusuf tonight, okay? See if he thinks you should be checked out.”

“So I _am_ going to die,” Eames concludes, too done in to open his eyes.

His only answer is the click of the hotel room door as it shuts behind Arthur.


	2. Chapter 2

“Help,” Eames says into the phone, “I’ve just woken up and I can’t work out what time it is.”

“What does the clock say,” Arthur says, sounding slightly awkward as he always does over the phone.

“It says ten,” Eames says, “but that can’t possibly be right because it’s light out.”

“It’s right if it’s ten a.m., not p.m.,” Arthur says. “Eames, did you sleep this whole time?”

Eames scrapes a hand over his face and stares out the window. It does, indeed, appear to be mid-morning. “Of course not,” he says. “Don’t be ridiculous. I just called to say I’d bring bagels if anyone else is interested.”

“I’m off carbs,” says Arthur as always, “but I’ll have a black coffee if you’re going to that place with the pink sign.”

“And Reas?” Eames says, staggering towards the loo now, abruptly aware of his bladder being about ready to burst even though he can now recall at least two trips to the toilet in the black of night.

“She says an onion cheese bagel,” Arthur says after a moment of muffled consultation. “Because she wants to die of coronary artery disease and halitosis, I guess.”

“An onion cheese bagel sounds brilliant,” Eames says, peeing blissfully. “Oh, with raspberry jam on.”

“That’s disgusting,” Arthur says. “I’m hanging up now.”

Eames flushes the toilet.

“Are you peeing while you’re talking to me?” Arthur asks, horrified.

“Oh, go on, try that with someone who hasn’t seen you coming out of the loo with your iPad in hand,” Eames says, and turns the shower on. “Talk soon, darling.”

“That’s different!” Arthur says, sounding surprisingly short-tempered for someone who really was shagged up to standard quite recently. He hangs up without saying anything further. Eames sets about looking for clothes that fit.

***

Eames feels fantastic, actually, nothing like he usually does when he oversleeps so spectacularly. Apparently he’s been cured by a brilliant sixteen-hour sleep, because he’s cheery, ravenous, delighted to be awake and alive and on his way to work. He gets a half-dozen onion cheese bagels and demolishes three on his way to the workspace, fingers greasy and sticky with jam, smearing Arthur’s massive cardboard cup of coffee haphazardly as he switches it from hand to hand. Eames isn’t dying, after all; clearly he’s nearly through the worst of it, he’s going to cycle any hour now, and this lingering weight will drop away, and everything will be right with the world again.

Eames whistles as he comes into the warehouse.

“Nice of you to join us,” says Reas, talking around the cap of a sharpie.

“Hmm, yes,” Eames agrees, and hands her a bagel, keeps the last two for himself. He glances round the space: Arthur’s nowhere to be seen. “Where’s his royal highness?” he asks, lifting the coffee cup up and frowning.

“I don’t know,” says Reas, “he said something about needing to run an errand and took off a couple of minutes ago.”

Eames frowns; it’s unlike Arthur to leave when there’s fresh hot coffee headed his way. Eames sets the cardboard cup on Arthur’s desk and heads over to his own space to start going through the file Arthur’s assembled for him since yesterday. There’s a post-it note on the drafting table’s surface, bright yellow, cheerful. On it Arthur’s written: _about time you showed up, asshole_. Eames can’t help smiling in answer, but he’s careful to wipe his hands off before he opens the manila folder and starts paging through it.

“Late night?” Reas asks, a few minutes in.

“Not at all,” Eames says.

“Well, you don’t look hung over, anyway,” she decides. “Arthur says you made the plant?”

“I don’t drink,” Eames informs her, and stems the question with the usual offhand, “drunk useless dad, put me off the notion entirely. And yes, I made the plant.”

Reas pulls the pen cap from her mouth and studies Eames with a new focus. There’s a long silence during which Eames tries to pretend that he’s not bothered by her scrutiny, staring back at her steadily, as though he’s an open book. He knows she’s trying to work out if he’s telling the truth or not. Fair enough, as Eames isn’t exactly an honest man — that much is part and parcel of his line of work. “My auntie was a drunk,” she says, seemingly coming to the conclusion that Eames has nothing to gain from snowing her on this point. She bows her head back to her work.

“Sorry,” Eames says, and means it.

Reas’ only answer is a small lift of her shoulder, but the silence from her corner of the room is easier after that.

***

Eames’ research quickly absorbs his attention, so much so that by the time the door opens to admit Arthur, Eames registers his return a bit distantly. It’s not until about ten minutes later that Eames remembers to look up to greet him, vaguely surprised that Arthur hasn’t long since started bitching about his cold coffee. But Arthur’s desk is empty again — or still? Eames tries to remember if Arthur’s sat down since he came in, and can’t place him anywhere at all after that initial burst of noise from the door, his hasty steps echoing round the workspace.

Eames stands up and checks his watch, stretches, and wanders as casually as he can towards the toilet. It’s not their first on-the-job encounter, but usually Arthur at least troubles to make eye contact first, give some sign beyond leaving a passive aggressive sticky note. Still, a hand job’s a hand job, and Eames isn’t about to say no when one’s being offered to him.

“Good luck,” says Reas, not fooled in the least, “he was in a terrible mood before he went out.”

“Was he?” Eames asks, surprised. “Well, perhaps I can put him right.” He pushes open the door to the loo, hand already on his belt buckle.

But Arthur isn’t waiting for Eames impatiently at all. He’s slouched against the tile wall with his fingertips in his mouth — or he is for all of a second before he clocks Eames’ entrance and bolts upright, pulling his hand away embarrassedly.

“Am I interrupting?” Eames asks, taken aback, because Arthur’s rarely jumpy, and Eames has never seen him biting his nails, not once in all the hairy dreadful jobs they’ve worked together.

“Yes,” says Arthur automatically, then comes over and pushes the door to even though it’s swinging closed slowly on its own. “No,” he revises, now he’s face to face with Eames. “I guess — no. You should.” And he ticks his head to the side a little as though that finishes his sentence.

Eames stares, baffled, and then gets it, turns his head in the direction Arthur’s chin was pointing. On the edge of the sink is perched a little plastic stick with a window in it.

“It takes five minutes,” Arthur says. “In this day and age. Can you believe it?”

Eames would make a crack about how he can’t believe no one’s invented an iPhone app where you piss onto the touch screen, except how his throat’s gone dry and his ears are ringing with shock. He swallows, blinks. Stares some more. “What,” he says, not managing a question.

“Well, I got a hold of Yusuf after I got off the phone with you,” Arthur says a little wildly, “and it seems he _has_ been getting some reports of his formulation fucking with hormones — but only hormones of the artificial variety.” He looks over at Eames, recklessly jams his fingertips back in his mouth, and talks around them. “Paulie Watson’s expecting in March. Can you — fucking fuck — _Watson_.” He yanks his hand away again and glares at Eames. “It fucks with the pill. Isn’t that just — perfect? Fuck.”

“It fucks with the pill,” Eames repeats stupidly, feeling his shock recede enough for thought. “Oh, _Arthur_.”

“Yeah,” Arthur says, succinctly. “Shit.” He checks his phone screen, where a timer is counting down from under a minute. “Should I look? I should wait.”

“Shit,” Eames says. “Arthur, you know I’d”—

—“Can we not have that talk?” Arthur interrupts. “Eames. Let’s not, okay. Let’s shelve that until we know if”— and he takes two steps over and peers down at the stick. “It’s still negative. Oh my god, please stay negative.”

“Isn’t it far too early to,” Eames half-asks, starting to make some sense of the situation now that the shock is fading a little, “I mean, we literally just fucked yesterday. And, and two days before that.”

“Plan B,” Arthur says, digging in his pocket and holding up a foil pill packet, not breaking eye contact with the window on the stick. “Already took the first dose.”

“Still, it’s a bit mad, isn’t it,” Eames says, “you’d hardly — unless, of course,” and he trails off, because — of course.

Arthur registers Eames’ silence, the nature of it, and looks up. “There was this guy, a couple of weeks ago,” he says, “in Paris. It was just a fuck. I mean, we used protection. But.”

“Of course,” Eames says again, nonsensically, stung and surprised by being stung. “Naturally.”

Arthur’s phone chirps, and Arthur’s shoulders sag. “Negative,” he exhales. “Oh, thank god.” He picks up the stick and wings it overhand into the trash can. “Fucking _Yusuf_. Fuck.” He breathes out shakily and looks over at Eames, wobbly grin spilling relief all over his face. “I nearly shit my pants for a second there,” he says.

Eames nods and tries to arrange his face to match Arthur’s expression. It’s a hard go, even though Eames is a decent actor. “Cheers,” he says confusedly.

“There are, ah,” Arthur says, scratching the nape of his neck, loose-limbed and cheerful suddenly, “there are two more tests in the packet if you — I mean, I know it was a while ago for us, the last time I — but, I guess, if you’ve been using this somnacin formulation on other jobs, with all the weird symptoms you’ve been having lately.” He trails off, fussing with his cuffs, clearing his throat. “Anyway, use them if you want, better safe than”— 

—“I couldn’t be,” Eames says, cutting Arthur short. “Remember? I — can’t. At all.”

“Oh, right,” Arthur says, though it’s ages since Eames told him, and Arthur hasn’t really had cause to remember in all this time. It’s not the sort of thing you worry about, terribly, when it comes to the co-worker you fuck casually now and then. “Lucky you,” Arthur says, half-laughing. “Look, Yusuf says — he says he thinks you should make an appointment for a check-up, anyway. He hasn’t heard anything about this formulation leading to fatigue and weight gain, or — or,” and Arthur’s face does something complicated. “Or funny — funny cravings.” Arthur looks up at Eames, and his expression has abruptly gone from vaguely embarrassed and confused to laser-sharp and intense.

“No,” says Eames. “Arthur, I really honestly couldn’t be.”

“Eames,” says Arthur. “You have sore —“ and he waves his hand around his own chest. “And you’re getting all,” and he makes an extremely unflattering puffy face and sticks his hands out from his sides. “And you fucking hate pistachios. You made me throw out an entire box of ice cream once because I used the same scoop in it as in my pistachio ice cream.”

Eames opens his mouth to protest further, but Arthur simply overrides him.

“I mean, if this formulation just ramps up fertility in general, maybe that would be enough to,” and Arthur now shifts to a sort of aeroplane take-off motion, where presumably the aeroplane is a symbol for motile sperm and conception and implantation and gestation and possibly childbirth. “You never know, right? Stranger things have happened.” He reaches across and grabs the open test packet, holds it towards Eames. “You should pee on one of these,” he says.

Eames stares at the packet for a moment, thoughtful. Aside from the entire huge fact that Eames was long ago told in no uncertain terms that he would never carry a child, there’s one more argument he could use to end all of Arthur’s wild speculation − but it’s not a card he’s willing to play, not given Arthur’s own casual revelation about Paris and ‘just a fuck’. He pokes his fingers into the box like he’s taking a fag from a packet, pulls out a stick. “I just — piss on it?” he asks. It’ll be negative, anyway; no harm done, and Arthur will settle down again. They can all get back to work, and Eames can forget about how his heart thumped wildly for the seconds between thinking Arthur might be — and then finding that he isn’t.

“There are little cups in here, somewhere,” Arthur says, digging in the packet, “you can pee in a cup and then”—

“I’ll just,” Eames says, and unzips his trousers one-handed, turning towards the urinals. “I’m telling you,” he says, “there’s not a bloody chance that”— and then he’s too busy trying to work out how to aim his dick and pee and stick the thing into the stream without making a mess, he should have used the stupid cup after all, fuck.

“Eames, jesus,” Arthur scolds, reaching out to take the thoroughly tested stick with a handful of paper towel. “What are you, a German Shepherd? It’s not good to wait until you have to pee that bad. You’re going to get kidney stones or bladder cancer or something.”

Eames smirks though he doesn’t feel the least bit amused, zips his trousers again, flushes the urinal. It’s done, now; exeunt all, just as soon as five minutes have passed and the test stays negative.

Only when Eames turns round and heads for the sink to wash his hands, he stops short, because Arthur’s standing frozen staring into the bunched up bit of paper towel.

“That’s not funny,” Eames says.

Arthur doesn’t appear to hear him. He doesn’t appear to be blinking, or breathing, actually.

“Arthur,” Eames says, properly annoyed now. “Give it here.” He swipes the paper towel from Arthur’s hand and strips it away from the plastic stick inside, gives the window a careless glance. “Negative,” he says triumphantly. “Can we bloody get back to work before Reas comes after us with a fire hose? She thinks we’re having the world’s longest workplace shag in here.”

“Eames, that’s not negative,” Arthur says. “Two lines. There are two fucking lines.”

“No, there aren’t,” Eames scoffs, because Arthur’s really carrying this too far. Eames looks back down at the test, impatient. “There’s only — there’s only”—

Arthur’s hand is on his shoulder, suddenly, guiding Eames over to sit on the closed toilet seat. It’s a good show too because Eames’ legs have gone wobbly and he’s not sure he can tell which way is up. Eames hangs his hand between his knees and scrabbles for his poker chip in his pocket. He scarcely trusts his eyes when he reads the spelling error — a moment ago his eyes saw one line where there are two — but he blinks and stares and blinks and stares, and the word remains ‘Mombassa’. Two esses. Two fucking lines. Faintly Eames registers the clatter of Arthur’s die hitting the counter three times in a row.

“You want me to go?” Arthur asks, after a little while has passed. “You want me to — to stay?” It’s clear from the inflection which answer he’s rooting for. Eames doesn’t blame him; he saw the stark relief on Arthur’s face when his own test came up with one line.

“It takes five minutes, though,” Eames says, remembering, head fuzzy. “Right?”

“No — once it’s positive, it, it stays,” Arthur says. “I mean, take the other one. Be sure.” He fumbles for the packet, hesitates. “Only, it’s kind of — it makes sense. Doesn’t it? All the weirdness.”

“It doesn’t make a bit of sense,” Eames says. “I have primary ovarian dysfunction — anovulation, Arthur. Full stop.”

“Well,” says Arthur, “Yusuf’s formulation”—

—“Doesn’t make a bit of difference if there’s no egg to be fertilized, it,” Eames says, “I was told, Arthur, in no uncertain terms. I was told, it could never happen.”

Arthur scrapes his fingers around the nape of his neck and sighs heavily. “Doctors fuck up all the time, Eames.”

Eames shakes his head again, dizzy and a bit sick. His ears are ringing. This is all starting to feel like a terrible unfunny joke played on him by the universe. All the cracks they’ve been trading about something really being wrong with Eames — well, they don’t seem the least bit implausible, now. Something is deeply, deeply wrong. Eames’ stomach roils heavily and it’s a fast turn round to get onto his knees in front of the loo, fling the lid up, hang his head over the bowl and heave once or twice, losing half the food he’d consumed so cheerfully on his way to work.

“See?” says Arthur, hovering in the margins of Eames’ vision, not willing to get very close to the action. “See? Throwing up, that’s”—

But Eames can’t bear it, not another word of it. He settles back on his heels and looks over at Arthur, gasping for air and too wound up to be circumspect. “Would you,” he half-barks, “bloody shut up about — it’s not, Arthur, it’s not _that_. It can’t be. And — if it were.” But he doesn’t have the heart, suddenly, to finish the thought. Eames drops his forehead down to rest on his arm and breathes out. Listens while Arthur shifts and takes breath to speak three or four times, expels it again without saying anything at all.

“If you need to take some time off,” Arthur says finally, “to take care of”—

—“Oh, fuck off,” Eames says, and after another long pause, Arthur does.

***

Eames calls three doctors before he finds one with ten minutes to spare if Eames can only get there quickly enough. 

After that, it doesn’t do to think about it too much, so Eames doesn’t. He puts it firmly out of his mind on the cab ride to the clinic and he rather insistently focuses his attention on a golf magazine in the waiting room, even though he hates golf. It’s better than looking up and round at the other patients. The one time Eames steals a glance, the woman next to him smiles conspiratorially and whispers _how far along?_ and Eames thinks he goes hysterically deaf for a bit. How far, how long, it’s madness, it’s macabre, it’s — Eames flips the page and glares down at an ad for golf tees. They come in several colours, apparently.

But once he’s called into in the exam room there’s not nearly enough to distract him. Eames sits in a crackly paper gown and fidgets, staring down a model of the male uterine reproductive system sitting on the counter opposite. There’s an ultrasound machine in the corner, a box of gloves. The table has stirrups.

It’s been years since Eames felt this much apprehension in a doctor’s office.

At long last there’s the soft rattle on the other side of the door, the doctor taking his chart out of the plastic holder, and then she enters. She’s older, with a grey-threaded ponytail and a vaguely hippie aura about her. Eames feels a bit more at ease immediately. She reminds him of his mum, a little.

“I’ve probably got cancer,” he blurts out, before she gets round to introducing herself or even shaking hands.

“Well, let’s have a look,” she says calmly enough, instead of starting off with a lot of stupid questions Eames can’t answer properly anyway because there’s somnacin and bullet wounds and a whole lot of other undocumented medical shit in his history. She just gestures for him to lie back on the table and rolls the ultrasound machine over, tugs up his paper gown. Before she squirts the jelly on, though, she puts on gloves and palpates his stomach gently. “Goodness,” she says, which — oh, cancer. Eames has cancer of the non-alcoholic-beer gut, he just knows it.

“What,” Eames asks, holding his breath.

“You didn’t feel that?” she asks, smiling a little.

“I had three onion cheese bagels for breakfast with raspberry jam on,” Eames answers. “I was sick, but I probably didn’t get them all back up. I reckon it’s a bit of bagel you felt. That or the cancer.”

“I think you felt that, Mr. Eames,” she says kindly, mouth twisting with faint polite amusement, and switches over to her stethoscope, listens to his stomach for long torturous seconds, moving the end around a few times. “Okay,” she says, “before I go on with this ultrasound, I should ask you — do you want me to tell you what I’m seeing?”

Eames hesitates, thinking it over, wondering if he wants to hear about whatever’s lurking in his stomach whilst lying flat on his back regretting his breakfast choices and thinking of the unenthusiastic way Arthur offered to stay in the loo with him earlier. “Do you mean,” he begins, and stops.

“What I mean,” she says, “is that between what I just observed and your positive home test, you’re almost certainly pregnant — but if you’re thinking about having a termination you may not wish to know anything further about your condition or the condition of the fetus.”

“Oh,” says Eames, glad he’s already lying down. Everything goes sparkly and dark for a few seconds. “You’re — fairly certain.”

“I think you’re fairly certain, too,” she says. “No?”

“I can’t be,” Eames says. “I’ve got POD. This isn’t meant to happen to me.”

“Well,” says the doctor, “we do get it wrong, now and then. Have you engaged in any unprotected sex since your last cycle?”

Eames thinks about it, because he hasn’t let himself think about it, really. “Milan,” he says, without quite meaning to, “in Milan, yes. But — that was — ages ago. I mean, if that was it, then I’d be”— and he lays a hand on his stomach, pushes gently as the doctor had done a moment ago, and this time he lets himself notice, the way his skin bumps back in reply. It’s the same stomach-flopping terrifying feeling Eames has been attributing to nausea, indigestion, nerves, water weight, but abruptly he knows it’s not any of those things. It hasn’t been, all along. And just like that, his heart is in his throat. Eames can’t think, can’t breathe.

“I’ll have a better idea once I have a look,” says the doctor, “but I’m comfortable estimating that you’re well into your second trimester by the size of you and the sound of the heartbeat.”

“The heartbeat,” Eames says numbly. “Second — second trimester? That’s mad.”

“Well,” she says, “it _is_ more common for men to get past the first trimester without being aware of their condition — but, I grant you, it’s still a bit of an anomaly to be this far along before”— She pauses, visibly suppresses an amused look, and goes on with a more sober professional tone. “Still, given a long natural cycle and your medical history, I think you might be excused for missing the symptoms. And you’re clearly in good shape, your abdominal muscles have been doing quite a good job staying tight and flat until now.” She hesitates, then goes on with a quick sympathetic smile. “I imagine it’s a bit of a shock, though?”

“A bit,” Eames says, splaying fingers wide over his stomach, slumping back against the crackly exam table paper. “You might say that.”

“Doctors sometimes like to pretend they know all the outcomes,” she tells him now, busy rolling the ultrasound machine in closer, powering it up, “but the truth is, there are such things as unexpected results. And — sometimes they’re not necessarily of the bad variety.” She flicks a switch and the screen goes bright, blank and waiting and wobbly navy blue. “Did you — I can turn this so you can’t see? I don’t have to tell you anything you don’t want to know.”

“Tell me what you see,” Eames says in a rush of exhalation. “Tell me everything.”

***

Milan was twenty-two weeks ago, according to the doctor’s best estimate. Back in his hotel room and after a long and harried search, Eames finds his appointment book in the side pocket of his suitcase and confirms this timeline easily enough. There’s a fish sketched over the week in question, Eames’ shorthand for Milan because of the seafood restaurant he particularly likes there. Eames had mussels, Arthur had fettuccine, the night after the job ended. Once back in the villa, Arthur bent Eames over the couch and —

— “Hello, hello,” Eames murmurs, flat on his back in his hotel bed with the appointment book open on his chest. Now he knows, now Eames knows and has seen and heard for himself, it’s become a constant low-grade distraction, the tug-bubble-flip of motion whenever he’s being still, himself. “Don’t worry,” he says, addressing the soft turn of his belly, rising like a mound under the hem of his untucked shirt, obvious and weird and unmistakeable, “I’m in no danger of forgetting about you, now that I know you’re there.”

He picks up the appointment book and counts forward eighteen weeks, picks a pen off the nightstand and scrawls it in fast, not a cryptic sketch or an illegible scrawl, but words, proper words: _due date_.

Across the room, his phone buzzes yet again. Eames lays the appointment book back down on his chest and steadfastly ignores the sound, focuses instead on remembering the navy and white curve of tiny nose on the monitor, the swoosh of a fetal heartbeat.

***

“Wanna try answering a fucking text?” says Arthur in a pissy tone, once he recovers from the surprise of finding Eames here in Arthur’s own room, sitting up against Arthur’s headboard now. “Reas is pissed and I thought you skipped town. What the fuck happened to you? What did the doctor say? — wait, are you using my laptop? Eames!”

“I needed to contact Parassidis,” Eames says, wriggling sock feet against the slippery coverlet. Arthur’s room is far neater than Eames’ own. It’s peaceful in here, easier to think somehow. “I knew you would have his email address.”

“That’s encrypted,” says Arthur, coming over and lifting the laptop off Eames’ outstretched legs. “How did you get into my room, anyway?” He glances sharply at the glass door leading to the balcony. “I know I left that locked. Fucking housekeeping.”

Eames holds Arthur’s spare keycard up, having pulled it from his own pocket as Arthur griped. “Lifted this off you yesterday,” he says. “Thought it might come in useful.” He swings his legs to the side and heaves himself upright with some effort. “And your password is always the last three cities you worked plus your birth year.”

“Hmm,” says Arthur, gaze drawn from his screen to the spectacle of Eames working himself up to a standing position. He hurries to set his computer down and offers a hand, too late to be of any use. “So, what did“— and he stops himself, with obvious effort. “It’s none of my business, I guess.” He chews on his lower lip, hesitating. “Are you okay, though?”

“Right as rain,” Eames says with all due vagueness, groaning and stretching. It’s amazing, actually, the way the fatigue has come rolling down over him again already so soon after his marathon sleep. He’s achy and droopy and regretting the salsa-laden burrito he had after leaving the obstetrician’s office earlier, because it’s firing acid up into his chest and he thinks he might die of burping. “And, no, it’s not particularly your business, you’re right.” 

“So you — did you say Parassidis?” Arthur says, and if his earlier anger wasn’t a tip-off to how worried he’s been, this underscores the point, the fact that it’s taken Arthur this long to come back round to Eames’ opening statement. “We don’t need him,” he says. “We have you, we don’t need a second forger.”

“No,” Eames concedes, “but Reas’ plan won’t work without at least one forger, and I’m out, darling.”

“I thought you,” Arthur says, and stops. “Eames, are you — okay?”

“Yes, perfectly,” Eames says, tugging at his shirt to pull it down again. “Parassidis,” he continues, “he’s already on his way, he’ll be here by tomorrow night. It mucks up Reas’ timeline a bit more, but there’s nothing to be done for it.”

“Why are you ditching on the job if you’re fine?” Arthur asks narrowly, mistrustful, more his usual self. He folds his arms over his chest, staring at Eames.

“Just as you said,” Eames tells him cheerfully, “none of your business. I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience, but I do have a flight to catch.”

There’s a long pause. “What are you going to tell Reas?”

“I already talked to her,” Eames says. “Got off the phone with her just before you came in.”

“She must be”—

—“Bloody incandescent with rage,” Eames provides, a bit ruefully. He likes Reas, honestly, hates letting her down, but there’s nothing to be done for it. “She’s got an impressive vocabulary when she’s in a strop.”

“You’re not going to tell me what’s going on, are you?” Arthur half-asks, resigned. “Or where you’re going?”

“No,” Eames says, firmly but not without a tinge of regret, “and no.” He hands Arthur his key card; Arthur takes it, fingers brushing against Eames’. “Take care, hm?”

“You too,” Arthur says, pocketing the key. He studies Eames’ face again, his curiosity now less urgent. “Eames. If you need anything,” and he clears his throat, awkward. “I have money. I know people.”

It’s utterly condescending and horrible: Arthur’s assumption that he can pull strings for Eames, help Eames out, like Eames can’t take care of himself at all, or if he can, he’ll do a far shittier job of it than Arthur could. It’s also terribly dear, and extremely Arthurian. Eames can’t help himself, he laughs a bit and lifts a hand to curve fingers round the back of Arthur’s neck. “I have no doubt you have both money and people to spare,” he tells Arthur, instead of teasing him outright. “But I’ve got myself out of many a scrape just fine.”

Arthur doesn’t bother arguing further, just ducks in with a harried hurt little sigh, kisses Eames’ mouth twice, then with the briefest pause, a third time, more slowly and gently. He brings a hand round to the small of Eames’ back as though to trap him here a little longer. And it’s tempting, god, it’s — for a moment Eames sways into Arthur, the familiar scent of him, his narrow strength, his soft mouth. He could have this, one more time, Arthur’s hands on him, maybe even Arthur inside him.

But, Eames remembers, pulling back, that’s running one risk too many. God knows what unguarded thing he might say — it’s all so new, so dizzying, so overwhelming yet. And, Eames reminds himself, he’s got Arthur with him now, a little bit of him anyway; he always will have.

“I’ll see you in Antwerp,” Eames says, very firmly indeed, making himself believe it. “Next month. The job with Loomer.”

“Right,” says Arthur, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, stepping away to give Eames room to exit. “Antwerp. Loomer. Next month.”

Eames smiles brightly and goes.

***

So probably Arthur is a little bit right about Eames being disorganized. No doubt Arthur has a full clean identity socked away, or two, or three, just in case he needs to disappear someday. Eames hasn’t got anything; every last one of his passports has some legal shadow besmirching the associated name. He was too young when he got into the business, stupid enough to use his birth name for the first several years, so there’s no going back to the long-abandoned identity he’d been born with. Several countries are simply blacked off the map for him, places he can never travel again barring major plastic surgery or the unexpected deaths of several key players in the counterfeit art world; this list includes England, and more recently, his own beloved Kenya. Money is less of a concern but it’s still a problem in the short term. Though his bank accounts are secure and amply stocked, they’re not easily accessible from America. Eames could use some cash on this side of the Atlantic, and soon. 

Happily, though, it’s a big world with many places he’s always thought of as too boring to commit felonies in. And he is, after all, a forger; identities are troublesome things to create but he’s done it dozens of times before and can do it again now. Eighteen weeks will suffice. He still has time to prepare. 

So Eames nips up to San Francisco and rings an old friend, does a few easy forgeries and swaps some artwork around until he’s got a cushion of American dollars with which to buy some proper supplies, to rent a room. By the time he’s set up properly, he’s still got six weeks left before he has to cross a border, six short weeks in which he’s got to get it absolutely right — because this identity isn’t a throwaway to be burned through on a lark or a single job. This passport is the real thing, the last one Eames ever hopes to make. If all goes well, if all goes as planned, in three years’ time he’ll be trading it in for a real one issued by a proper government body like any other law-abiding citizen of a first world country.

So Eames is meticulous, patient, thorough. He spends hours on the details and tracks down as many authentic components as he possibly can given the time-frame. The price the passport could fetch if it were for sale would be a pretty penny indeed. It’s Eames’ masterwork of identity fraud. All it’s lacking, after two weeks of work go by, is a name.

Eames goes out and buys a massive paperback full of baby names. The clerk gives him a fond smile over the counter, because there’s a big difference between barely showing at twenty-two weeks and bursting out of his shirts at twenty-eight. Eames is undeniably an expectant mother; people defer to him in queues, offer unsolicited advice when he lingers in front of displays of dummies and nipples, and ask _when are you due?_ over and over.

“Christmas,” he says, every time, and finds his hand resting on the high curve of his belly, his fingers pushing into the solid bump like he used to scrape them over the face of his totem. 

Back in the flat he’s renting, Eames takes long baths. His belly sticks up out of the sudsy water like a pink slippery boulder in a stream, and the pages of the baby name book go wrinkly and ragged as he underlines name after name: _Spenser, Gideon, Nigel, William, Edgar_. It’s for the passport, of course, not for Eames’ passenger, but it’s a hard go to focus on this fact. Finally Eames gives up and starts a second list of possibilities, names that aren’t innocuous, bland, unremarkable names for a forged identity, but rather names he’d like to relish the shape of in his mouth, names he’d not mind whispering fondly or shouting irritably or spelling out over the phone to a school registrar. It’s a long list, and it goes on growing just as relentlessly as Eames’ belly pushes out from his body.

Eames settles on Tristan for himself, in the end. He rather hates the name, but Eames hasn’t known or worked with a Tristan his whole career, and besides it sounds a likely poncy sort of name for an Englishman who’s emigrated to the west coast of North America. That much settled, the second list continues to grow alarmingly longer by the day, filling up in his few idle hours: _Gabriel, Owen, Phillip, Wesley_ , on and on and on.

After the passport’s done — Tristan Paul Eames, born January 1978 in Bristol, immigrated 2002, citizenship granted in 2008 — there’s a whole host of accompanying puzzle pieces that need to be slotted into place. Some of it is more Arthur’s line of work than Eames’, honestly — creating a past on the internet, making it look as though Eames didn’t just pop up like a mushroom, like he’s been settled and happy and working for several years already. Eames makes some calls, some payments, and soon enough he’s got a proper presence on the internet as Tristan Eames: a Facebook account, an Amazon wishlist, a few scattered reviews on wine-tasting sites, a Netflix profile. His name is also on the membership rosters of a few important professional associations going back six or seven years. It’s a long while since Eames styled himself ‘Doctor’, and never before with ‘Eames’ following it, but he knows he’ll have to return to practice eventually, if only to set a good example for the sprog.

Eames has just gone thirty-two weeks when he drives up the coast in a modest little Volvo: Portland, Seattle, over the border at Tsawwassen, and finally, Vancouver. Sea air and blue-grey clouds and mountains hemming in the bowl of the big city. Eames parks at Jericho Beach and watches the sunset through his windshield, the lower half of the steering wheel bearing down uncomfortably into the taut swell of his belly.

Tomorrow Eames will find a house somewhere a little out of the way, someplace quiet and pretty with lots of small children nearby, lots of mums with pushchairs and umbrellas and steaming cups of tea. And next week, Eames will brave standing on a chair in order to paint a nursery pale purple, because he might be having a boy but he’s not forfeiting his right to every baby colour he wants. And next month, he’ll have Yusuf post a card for him from halfway round the world.

It will be the card Eames is writing right now, propping the paper up against the steering wheel, forcing his hand steady and his writing neat:

_Sorry about Antwerp. Bit of a hang-up in Jakarta. Might blog about it sometime. Do people still use Myspace? - E_

Eames flaps the card to dry the ink and watches the ocean turn white, navy, black.


	3. Chapter 3

“Eames?” says Arthur, and negates the idea with a quick tick of his chin to the left. “No, Eames is dead, haven’t you heard?”

The extractor, Namato, pulls a skeptical face. “You really believe that cock-and-bull story that’s going around? Gambling debts my ass, there’s no way Eames would let himself get caught by some two-bit bookie in Jakarta.”

Arthur sits back in his chair and rolls his die between his fingers. “I know the guy who identified his body for the local police,” he offers, a little lamely, because he doesn’t believe it for a minute himself, no matter how breathy and horrible and convincing Yusuf sounded over the phone two weeks earlier. But if Eames wants everyone to think it — well, Arthur supposes that as a sometime-friend and more-often-fuck-buddy, it’s maybe his duty to keep spreading the lie. “There’s plenty of good thieves, anyway,” he goes on. “I worked with Woczynski last year in Prague, he could pull this job easy.”

“You know how to reach him?” Namato checks.

“Yeah, I’ve got a number to call,” says Arthur, pocketing his die.

Namato moves on to the next part of the plan. While he talks, Ariadne leans towards Arthur from the next chair over, brow clouded over with worry. “Eames is dead?” she whispers.

Arthur doesn’t quite wink — not his style, winking — but he half-closes one eye to convey his own private doubt, then nods back at Namato to redirect Ariadne’s attention to the problem at hand. He can’t help it, though she’s been a pro in her own right for some time now; she’ll always be that uncertain if brilliant apprentice to Arthur, he supposes.

But two days later, Arthur forcibly remembers another aspect of Ariadne’s personality when Ariadne corners him on his way out of the workshop. “Come for a drink,” she says, quietly. “I have — something. I think I found something.”

Arthur follows her to a bar down the street, into a corner booth. Once they’re seated and have drinks in front of them, Ariadne pulls out an iPad and starts showing Arthur a series of documents she’s uncovered in her spare time the last couple of days: a coroner’s report, grisly photos, half-translated police reports from Indonesia, a news magazine article giving a run-down of the illegal gambling scene in Jakarta.

“I’ve seen all of this,” Arthur says shortly, though he still has to take a quick bracing gulp of whiskey to get past the too-good work of the photographic manipulation. “And you know faking this is all perfectly within Eames’ skill set. He’s a fucking genius with Photoshop. Once he made this absolutely convincing photo of a dog driving a zamboni in”— 

“I know,” she says, cutting in impatiently, “it’s total bullshit, obviously. I checked the immigration records and Yusuf was in Kenya the same day he says he was called to identify Eames’ body in Jakarta.”

“Hmm,” says Arthur, wondering uneasily where Ariadne’s headed with this.

“So I did some more digging,” Ariadne says, and that’s when Arthur remembers that she’s the same tenacious little fucker who squirrelled into Dom Cobb’s twisted subconscious with no hesitation when Arthur — who’d been working and travelling with Cobb for a _year_ — was loath to do the same because it seemed intrusive and inappropriate. She flips to another PDF, a hospital bill from Germany. “I think Eames is sick,” she says. “I mean, my German is for shit, but this says — it says _cancer_ , Arthur.”

Arthur huffs a humourless laugh. “He’s not — this is just more bullshit,” he says, waving a hand, ignoring the throb of worry. “If you keep going, you’ll probably find out that Eames also had a sex change in Thailand and got executed by the mob in Montreal and became a ballroom dance instructor in Des Moines.”

“Ballroom dance,” Ariadne repeats, puzzled.

“Or — or fucking scrapbooking in Liverpool, or running a Starbucks in Sydney.” Arthur throws back the rest of his drink and pulls his coat over his shoulders, ready to leave. He’s had enough of this Blue’s Clues crap from Ariadne. “The point isn’t what happened to Eames,” he says. “The point is that Eames doesn’t want to be found, and trust me — you’re not finding him if that’s the case.”

Ariadne opens her mouth to protest, or maybe ask another question, because Ariadne is nothing if not an unending source of questions, but Arthur is already out of the booth, tossing a bill down onto the table. “Leave it,” he says, hearing himself sound more than a little dangerous. “Just fucking leave it.”

***

Back in his hotel room, Arthur drinks a bit more and surfs the internet. He pokes around Facebook to catch up on his family, spends half an hour in the YouTube viral video vortex, and then reads a few political blogs because liberal rage usually distracts him better than anything. 

But it’s no good this time. Arthur shuts down his laptop, brushes his teeth, gets undressed and into bed, clicks off the light. He lies flat on his back for half an hour before he finally gives up and turns the light on again. 

The card is tucked away inside the lining of his suitcase. This is a bit of a stupid precaution when it’s the least informative bit of paper Arthur’s ever seen, and Arthur’s in the business of getting information out of paper. 

Lying on the bed, he skims the lines again, Eames’ dark sure cursive writing pointing Arthur in the direction of his most obvious and transparent cover story. The message is clear enough: _I’m fine, so sod off._

It’s been twelve weeks. Eames is probably showing by now, assuming he was about four weeks along when he took the test; couldn’t have been much more, with how shocked he’d been. This is, of course, assuming that Eames didn’t decide not to — but though Arthur can’t say exactly why, though the very idea seems insane, he’s almost certain Eames is going through with it. Eames, the badass smooth-as-shit forger and thief, gambler and all-round shifty fucker, doesn’t seem at all a likely candidate for motherhood. And yet, Arthur remembers the stunned way Eames said it: _I was told, Arthur, in no uncertain terms. I was told, it could never happen._

Like he’d asked, Arthur thinks for the hundredth time. Like it was something Eames wanted, badly, in a different life.

When it comes down to it, there’s actually very little Arthur knows about Eames. He does background checks on most of his colleagues, of course, but digging too much into other criminals’ pasts is a good way to breed more mistrust, so Arthur limits his research to their recent history, current loyalties and betrayals. He’s known Eames and worked with him long enough to have a good sense of his working habits, his friends and enemies, but when it comes to Eames’ distant past Arthur’s got nothing. He didn’t need to know, before, and he really doesn’t have a reason to find out, now.

There are plenty of good thieves, and wherever Eames is, he’s fine.

***

Woczynski is good, adequate, gets the job done. Ariadne is her usual spectacular driven self. Namato keeps things tight, professional, neat. They finish the extraction. Arthur packs up his PASIV and gets ready to leave, heading for a long delicious month of doing fuck-all over the holidays, though he hasn’t decided where yet. They’re in Malaysia; he could hop up to Thailand and go cliff-diving, or over to Hong Kong and shop for days. Or he might even drop by Utah, let his mom feed him up for a while.

“If you want it,” Ariadne says, and gives him a sealed envelope along with a meaningful look.

“Motherfucker,” says Arthur, yanked out of his happy thoughts of vacation spots. He glances around the workshop, but it’s just the two of them left. He glares at Ariadne. “I told you to leave it, goddammit.”

“This is me, leaving it,” she says. “You have the only copy of the information. I destroyed everything else. I just — needed to know.”

“Your fucking ‘need to know’,” Arthur says hotly, “is gonna get your ass killed one of these days, Ariadne.” He’s crumpling the envelope a bit in his fist as he speaks; he can’t help it.

“My ‘need to know’ saved all our asses on the Fischer job,” Ariadne responds with equal anger. “I didn’t have to tell you dick about this, Arthur. Forgive me for thinking you might actually give a shit about someone else.”

“About Eames?” Arthur laughs dryly, taken aback by Ariadne’s naivety. She might be a professional now, but she’s got a steep and unpleasant learning curve still ahead if she seriously thinks that working a dreamshare heist with someone qualifies you as friends. “Right. I’m lying awake at night worried about his tender little forger’s heart, I’m all broken up by his need to drop off the radar because he finally double-crossed the wrong people. He’s an _asshole_ , Ariadne. He’s a first-rate bag of dicks. You wasted your time looking him up, and it’s probably going to bite you in the ass if you really did find him.”

“Yeah, well,” says Ariadne, shouldering her bag, in a hurry all of a sudden, “he was right about you, wasn’t he. You condescending piece of shit.” She jerks her chin in the direction of the envelope Arthur’s holding. “Have fun dropping that down the first sewer grate you pass.” She storms out of the workshop, slamming the door behind her.

Arthur slumps down against her bare drafting table and exhales shakily. He thinks he probably convinced Ariadne he’s more of an asshole than Eames, but he hopes he warned her off Eames a bit too. He wasn’t lying about Ariadne’s curiosity being a liability, anyway; it’s going to fuck her over sooner or later. And more importantly, it won’t do Eames’ cover any favors if word gets around that Ariadne’s been digging.

Arthur’s fingers shake a bit as he rips the envelope open. 

It’s a street address, nothing else, not even a city name or a country. Probably not even the right address at that, probably just another bread crumb trail leading nowhere.

It slips in alongside the postcard in Arthur’s suitcase lining.

***

_r u online_

Arthur swipes away the iMessage notification and goes back to idly surfing porn gifs on Tumblr. The hotel wifi is for shit, really; half the images are fucked up and frozen, making implausible sex positions seem downright impossible — guys with three dicks and two come-splashed faces but no arms. But it’s better than —

_come online_

Arthur swipes the message away again and rolls onto his stomach, scrolls down further, and then flips over to his newsfeed to scan the headlines. It’s early yet in North America, not much news to be had beyond Asian business and European politics, the fucked up global economy.

_Joseph Arthur Albert COME ONLINE for the LOVE OF HECK_

Arthur sighs; full name, a sure sign he’s been MIA for too long. He taps over to Skype and scowls down at the iPad’s screen while it connects and logs him in. This angle gives him a double chin on camera, he knows from experience. Fuck it. It’s only his sister.

There’s a ping, and then a chime, and then Arthur hits ‘accept’ and waits for the sketchy-ass wifi to get its shit together, finally pulling up an image of a kitchen in Utah and half his sister’s head — the top half.

“Lauren,” he says. “Move the camera.”

“Oh for pete’s sake,” she says, and the image wobbles, steadies on her face. Her dimples flash, Arthur obviously now showing up on her end too. “Ha! I knew you were around. I saw you posting photos of Thailand on Facebook ten minutes ago.”

“What’s up?” Arthur asks, grinning back in spite of himself. She’s a sight for sore eyes, Lauren: happy and relaxed and wearing earrings clearly manufactured in a kindergarten classroom. He can almost feel the warmth of the house behind her, the bright light and messy counters and toys underfoot. It’s enough to make him the tiniest bit homesick.

“Nothing,” she says. “Mom says you talked about coming back home for Thanksgiving next week?”

“Maybe,” Arthur acknowledges distantly, because he knows from long experience that wanting to be home and actually being home never quite line up as he expects them to. “I mean, there’s a thing here with”—

—“Work,” she interrupts, smile dimming a little. “I know, I — hang on, hang on,” and she’s moving out of frame, presumably to respond to the sudden squall of crying in the background. “He’s teething, poor little man,” she says. “Jackson, say hi to Uncle Joey.”

“Don’t call me that,” Arthur says, squirming. The baby is drooling over his fist and staring wide-eyed at the screen. Arthur hates it when babies stare at him like they expect him to do something worthy of their notice. 

“You think you’d be used to it by now,” Lauren points out. “You’re, what, twenty-three times an uncle?”

“Uh, nope, Jackson actually makes twenty-four,” Arthur says, doing a quick tally. “You guys can stop breeding any time, by the way.” He tilts his head and squints at the baby. “Why’s he wearing a bead necklace?”

“It’s an amber teething necklace,” Lauren says. “Amber’s a natural analgesic.”

“Sure it is,” says Arthur, lifting an eyebrow, imagining the reaction he’d get if he tried to swap out vicodin with an amber necklace next time someone gets shot on the job. “He looks like a little tiny stoner dude.”

“Joey!” she says, but she’s laughing even as she rubs a hand over the fluffy crown of Jackson’s head in apology.

“No, seriously,” Arthur persists, “I think the guy who tried to sell me weed at the beach today was wearing that exact necklace.”

“And I just bet you turned him down?” Lauren asks skeptically.

“I did, actually,” Arthur says. “The pot in Koh Samui is terrible. I made that mistake once before.”

“Joey,” Lauren clucks, still smiling faintly as she jogs Jackson on her knee. “Oh, did you hear that Susan and Dave bought a new house?”

Arthur resettles his weight and tries not to sigh impatiently. He loves his family, he does, but he can’t help but find their general aura of wholesomeness tiring and a little boring after a few minutes of conversation. “Actually, I have to,” he says, about to lie about having a business meeting, but something makes him stop for a second, change course. “Where do you get one of those necklaces anyway?”

“Oh, lots of places,” says Lauren, and then her gaze sharpens. “Why?”

“A friend,” says Arthur shortly. “Having a baby.”

“Well, there are a ton of online retailers,” she says. “I’ll send you a few links.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Arthur says, thinking he can probably ship it right to Eames’ supposed address, probably gift-wrapped, probably with a card signed by the company. That would be simplest, he supposes. That would be best.


	4. Chapter 4

The roll of masking tape slips from Eames’ grip, bounces to the floor, and rolls off under the dresser. Eames stares after it balefully for a long moment and considers leaving it there, going out to the hardware store down the road and buying a new roll. It honestly seems like a better use of his time, and far less monumental a task than getting down on the floor and reaching for the tape, standing up again afterwards.

But that’s absolutely ridiculous, Eames knows. He steps over to the dresser, dragging the stepstool behind him. It’s not so hard, getting down to the floor; it’s mostly just doing what gravity is urging every minute of the day. Eames drops to one knee, supporting himself on the stepstool, then the other knee, and then finally down onto his arse with a grunt. He pats around under the dresser but he can’t reach, can’t see. Flat on his side is better — there’s the roll of tape, just out of reach. Eames scoots closer, sighs with effort, and stretches his arm out far as it will go, just managing to catch the roll with his fingertips. The position makes him yet more uncomfortably aware of his bulk: the heavy drop of his belly, yes, always there, but the unaccustomed swell of his chest too, the weighty feel of his arse and thighs and arms. Eames scrabbles the tape into his grip and then lets inertia abruptly overtake him. 

He’s a beached whale; he’s a hippopotamus in the mud. He’s Gibraltar. He will just stay here, flat on the floor with one arm under the dresser, until the baby falls out of him. It feels like it must happen any minute.

This is, of course, when the doorbell rings.

“Buggering fuck,” Eames says feelingly. It’ll be Anita with the pram she says she’s finished with, or maybe Rob come to help Eames with the high-up bits of the painting. The neighbourhood is terrifyingly friendly, but Eames has quickly come to see this as a blessing. He’s never been so grateful for ready hands and nosy neighbours as he is now: approximately one billion (or thirty-eight) weeks pregnant, his whole body and brain are seemingly given over to the work of growing a baby.

The doorbell rings again, twice in a row, anxious-sounding.

“Coming!” Eames bellows. “Be right there!” Last thing he needs is someone having a police car come round to break in, fit-looking young patrol officers stumbling across Eames sprawled out helplessly like a geezer with a broken hip. There’s no help for it. He’s going to have to stand up again.

It’s a multi-step process, and every other step goes like this: _pause while grunting unattractively_. 

Finally Eames is on his feet, though he’s fairly sure he will opt for the hardware store if this problem ever presents itself again. 

There’s a full-length mirror just at the turning of the hallway; Eames slows unwillingly to peer at himself in it, because he’s well used to seeing someone else in the mirror but this is something bizarre and new, seeing himself blown up and puffy. His hair looks fantastic, and with the late pregnancy hormone levels his beard stubble has reached the perfect degree of scruffiness though he hasn’t shaved for days and days. The highlights end there, though. Eames tugs down at the front of his shirt, hauls up on the back of his sagging jeans, and decides not to investigate the state of his skin more closely. Hormones might work wonders for his hair and beard but they also seem to have knocked his complexion back into adolescence. He’s a bloated spotty mess with glowingly perfect follicles.

The doorbell pings again. Eames blinks back into the moment — right, the door. Someone is at the door. No one ever told him this part, how thirty-eight weeks can feel like early-onset dementia. He steps away from his reflection and continues to the door, yanks it open, pushes at the spring-loaded storm door because whoever was waiting has just given up and is halfway down the steps. “Sorry, I’m here, I’m here,” Eames says, and then freezes. He knows that back, that lovely effortless posture, that dark shiny head of hair, that — god — that bloody fantastic arse.

Arthur’s step checks and he looks back over his shoulder, gets halfway through a pivot before he takes Eames in. Freezes, just like that, ripe soft mouth slightly agape. Arthur’s wearing a wool overcoat, leather gloves, his Varvatos boots. He looks exactly as he always does: flawless.

Flawless, and gobsmacked.

Eames is not a little gobsmacked himself. He’s not witless enough with pregnancy to spend more than a second wondering how Arthur even found him — Arthur can find anyone, full stop, if he only puts his mind to it — but Eames is most definitely stuck on the _why_ of it. He’s fairly sure Arthur has absolutely no compelling reason to show up unannounced on Eames’ doorstep, thirteen days before Christmas.

Eames glances down at his own middle, where Arthur’s gaze is somewhat understandably fixed, and revises his own thought process. Arthur had no compelling reason to be here, that he _knew_ of. Until about ten seconds ago.

“So,” Eames says, leaning against the doorframe, giving in to the absurd. “Can I make you a cup of tea, then? It seems we need to chat.”

There’s every chance, Eames reminds himself, that Arthur doesn’t even remember Milan.

********

Arthur follows Eames into the house, lets the screen door swing closed behind him, listens as the faint drizzle outside suddenly ticks up into a proper rain shower. It pings a sense of deja-vu, abruptly; by the time Arthur’s shrugged out of his coat, he’s figured out why.

It was raining in Milan, too.

***

Arthur was not as drunk as Eames thought, in Milan. The fettuccine soaked up most of the wine he downed, leaving Arthur with a faint pleasant buzz that rode the edge between sleepy and horny. They got a cab back to the villa, every turn in the road making Arthur sway up against Eames, fetch up into Eames’ pleasing bulk and warmth. They had to run for the door to avoid getting soaked, and when they started peeling away wet layers in the foyer they didn’t stop until they were bare.

Bare-assed, barefooted, barely drunk. Arthur sloped his shoulders back against the cracking plaster wall and let his hips tilt outwards. He fisted his cock lazily, watching Eames watch him, Eames narrow and inky with two or three dark stringy necklaces hanging between his pecs. “You just gonna stand there,” Arthur asked without asking. “Or are you going to bend me over?”

“You’re too bladdered,” said Eames, though he sounded less accusatory and more amused. “You never know when to stop when you’re in this state. Let’s keep things low-impact, hmm? Get onto the couch, I’ll blow you.”

It was Arthur’s moment to tell Eames he wasn’t that drunk, but first of all Eames tended to get weird about it when Arthur tried to argue degrees of sobriety, and secondly, Arthur had the lovely coiling sense that he could play this up to his advantage if just he took the right tack. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah, okay,” but instead of heading for the the couch, Arthur stepped forward and pressed himself up against Eames, kissed Eames and felt him up — back, ass, waist, shoulders, neck — until Eames went from patient tolerance to pliancy, and finally to ardor.

“What if I fucked you?” Arthur suggested, when pulling his mouth away caused Eames to make an unhappy little noise. “I’m not too drunk for that. You could tell me if I get too rough.” He slid his hands down Eames’ arms, watching Eames’ tattoos scroll out under the slip of his palms. Stopped at Eames’ wrists and circled them with his fingers. “You could stop me,” Arthur added, low and sweet, smiling.

“Oh, I could stop you,” Eames answered, returning the smile. His mouth was pink, plush, open. Inviting. “If I felt like it.”

So Arthur got Eames on the couch, elbows on the arm, knees knocking cushions to the floor, and Arthur fingered him for long minutes while Eames went pink and sweaty and wordless. “Wait here, I’ll get the condoms,” Arthur said, and Eames reached back and ringed his fingers around Arthur’s wrist in a deliberate echo of Arthur’s action.

“This is me, stopping you,” he said, breathing hard. “Arthur, we just did blood panels for the job, and you know I’m safe.”

Arthur hesitated, because — well, Eames was right, of course — but where Eames was weird about drinking, Arthur had his own hangups around barebacking. It was messy. It was risky. It — it was kind of shockingly intimate, and personal, and Arthur didn’t like to go around being intimate and personal with a co-worker he fucked sometimes, even if he spent a chunk of his working life literally inside said co-worker’s mind.

“Okay, go on, then,” Eames said, feeling Arthur’s reluctance in the silence. He let go of Arthur’s wrist. “If you’d rather get a condom, it’s fine. Go.”

Arthur flattened a palm on the small of Eames’ back and felt his heart pounding in his temples. He was drunk, after all; Arthur was hooped, he was blasted, he was clearly wasted out of his fucking mind because — 

“Ah, yes,” Eames said, in answer to the press of Arthur’s cock against him, into him. Eames dropped his head and shuddered, and then reached under and started jerking himself off. “God, that feels so fucking amazing, Arthur.”

Arthur watched, dizzy and frantic, as his cock slid in and out of Eames. They looked good together like this, he thought, messy and stupid and risky and — really goddamn personal. Arthur’s mind locked around that thought and he refused to follow it any further. Instead he closed his hands around Eames’ hips and fucked him steady and hard and perfect until Eames’ breath stuttered and his hand slowed, and then Arthur leaned forward and pushed his mouth against the top of Eames’ spine and rolled his hips into Eames’.

********

“You said you were safe,” Arthur says now, snapping his gaze away from the rain-spattered glass of the screen door. He finishes shrugging out of his coat and drapes it over his forearm. He’s not making eye contact, quite. The tips of his ears have gone red.

“I thought I was,” Eames reminds Arthur, though he can hardly fault Arthur for his confusion given the shock he’s just had. “POD, remember?”

“Right,” says Arthur, nodding along. “I thought you meant you were on the pill — but I guess you wouldn’t bother if you thought that”— He pauses, slips his coat over to his other forearm and busies himself rearranging it to hang perfectly. “So — that was March, I guess. Italy.”

“Yeah,” Eames says, resignedly. There goes that last slim hope.

“Do you know if it’s,” Arthur begins to ask, then stops himself.

Eames reaches out and takes Arthur’s coat from him, hangs it up in the hall closet. “Come on, let’s have something hot to drink,” he says. “I’m down to herbal tea, I sleep like shite these days, but nothing’s stopping you having coffee if you like.”

Arthur looks very much like he’d like to bite his nails again, but instead he just nods and trails Eames into the kitchen.

“Pardon the clutter,” Eames says, guiding Arthur towards the small dining table. “I’m assured the nesting phase will pass soon as everything’s squared away.” He slides the stack of folded blankets and tiny shirts over on the tabletop, makes room in front of Arthur’s chair. “Did you want coffee, then? Tea? Water?”

Arthur is looking round, taking it all in: the laundry half-finished, the stacks of paint cans, the pumpkin spice muffins cooling on the stove. The dog-eared and wrinkly baby name book with the three-page list serving as bookmark somewhere in the W’s. The unopened box containing the finest breast pump Canadian money can buy. The bassinet in the corner, waiting. 

Everything is waiting, really.

“I brought you,” Arthur says as he completes his survey. He pats the front of his jacket, pulls out a flat package. “I brought a thing.” He doesn’t extend it towards Eames though; Arthur just holds the packet in his hand and frowns at it like he isn’t sure what it contains. “I was on my way to Utah,” he says, “for the holidays.”

Eames turns away, puts the kettle on and opens the cupboard in search of coffee. Karen brought some over last time she visited, telling Eames he couldn’t be a proper Canadian mum without Tim Hortons in the pantry. Arthur’s making no sense, really, but Eames can be patient. He’s spending most of his life practicing patience these days.

“The fog,” Arthur says, and tosses the packet onto the table. “My connecting flight was grounded. I figured — why not see if Ariadne was right? She thought she found you. And I had this gift.” He pushes it a bit further away, looking thoroughly dissatisfied now. “Wow, it seems like a really stupid gift now.”

Eames finds the coffee, the french press, and sets everything at the ready for boiling water. His feet hurt and his back aches and he’s fairly certain Arthur’s going to be properly angry any minute. “Of course it’s yours,” he says, in answer to the half-question Arthur bit back moments earlier in the front entrance. “It’s your baby, Arthur. There’s no question of that.”

Arthur looks up, finally, finally meets Eames’ gaze. “How could you not know you were pregnant?” he says. “Jesus, Eames, you were — what? Five months in?”

“Nearer to six,” Eames answers, because he’s long since got over that particular shock. “I didn’t think it was possible. I do spend most of my working life separating the impossible from reality in a very determined way, after all. I simply — couldn’t believe it. Didn’t, until I saw him for myself.”

“And you didn’t think I should know,” Arthur bites out, at last coming round to anger. “You didn’t think I’d want to know?”

“Are you happier for knowing it?” Eames asks, keeping calm.

“Is that the fucking point?” Arthur says, straightening up in his chair, glaring now. “Being happy?”

“I’m happy,” Eames points out. “And now, you aren’t. You see my reasoning.”

“Yeah, well,” says Arthur, “your reasoning sucks, Eames.”

The kettle clicks off. Eames pours out the water — into the french press for Arthur, into a mug for himself — and comes over to sit with Arthur while things steep and brew. “I thought it would be best,” he says. “I didn’t know you would turn up on my doorstep bearing gifts.” He picks up the package Arthur discarded with such disdain. “May I?”

“Be my guest,” Arthur mutters. He looks like he’s got a throbbing headache now, pale and drawn and grouchy.

Eames opens the package and a string of amber beads falls out into his palm. “Oh, darling,” he says, “usually the only necklaces you give me are pearl necklaces.”

Arthur’s sense of humour is one of his most closely-guarded secrets; even he seems surprised when he coughs out a laugh. “Eames,” he says, even as he dimples. “First of all, you _like_ it when I give you pearl necklaces, and second of all, that’s not for you.”

“So they’re meant for _your_ arse,” Eames decides, frowning at the beads and running them between his fingers. “They seem small, but I suppose with the right imagination”—

—“For the fucking baby,” Arthur says. “It’s amber. It’s for teething. It’s — it’s the hot holistic earth mama shit right now, or so I’m told.”

“You think I’m a hot holistic earth mama?” Eames asks, grinning, dropping the beads onto the table again.

“You know you’re hot,” Arthur says, shaking his head, sounding for all the world like he means it. He laughs briefly, toying with the necklace, and then looks up at Eames again through his lashes. “Are we flirting?”

“Possibly,” Eames says. “Mostly I’m just chuffed that you’re not shouting at me or threatening vile things.”

But even this brief allusion to their argument is enough. Arthur’s smile fades a bit and he pulls his hand back. “That coffee’s got to be ready by now,” he says, rising.

“No, no, that’s for me to do,” Eames says, beginning to gather himself to stand again.

“Stay put,” Arthur says firmly, and though his voice is a bit chilly yet, his hand is warm when it pushes down on Eames’ shoulder in passing, urging him back into his seat. “I can push a plunger and use a spoon.”

“All sorts of useful,” Eames says, putting on an impressed voice. “I must send a note of thanks to the YVR airport authority for rerouting you to me.”

Arthur smirks and busies himself with the coffee. “I can work a paint roller, too,” he says. “If you’re interested.”

The baby chooses this moment to execute a slow starfish stretch, all four limbs akimbo from the feel of it. It’s the sort of thing Eames found delightful, back in San Francisco. Nowadays it feels rather uncomfortably like Eames is housing a cephalopod who is trying to open a pickle jar inside his belly. “Mmph,” Eames groans, pushing back against the bump and drag of a baby foot, trying to convince the sprog to stay folded up. “It’s called the fetal position for a reason,” he tells his belly. “If you don’t like it, get the fuck out. Plenty of room to spread out, here.” When he looks up, Arthur is frozen with his hand on the press’s plunger, looking rather ashen again. His eyes are wide as he stares at Eames, alarmed.

“Is it,” he says, haltingly, “is it time?”

“No,” says Eames, “unless you mean time for fetal yoga and callisthenics. The little arsebite is restless.”

Arthur relaxes visibly and goes on pressing the plunger down, though his knuckles are still a bit white where he’s gripping the carafe.

“I have a friend helping with the painting,” Eames says, in hopes of offering some relief. “It’s nearly done, actually. The crib’s together. I’m — fairly well set.”

Arthur pours himself a cup of coffee, lifts it to his lips and takes a sip. “This is horrible coffee,” he says, almost in a neutral tone.

“What I mean to say,” Eames tries again, “is that — I’m fine, here. Arthur. I want for nothing.”

It is utterly, absolutely true. Eames has everything he needs, both materially and socially. He’s making a life here, and it’s shaping up very nicely indeed. And if it might be improved by the addition of Arthur to his homely little kitchen, well — it would also be hugely complicated by him, by his presence. Eames has always favoured simplicity.

Arthur lowers his mug, from which he keeps doggedly sipping in spite of his grimaces. “My flight to Salt Lake is early tomorrow,” he says. “But, I mean, I can just — just go back to the airport and get a hotel room there.”

“Stay,” Eames says, relieved that Arthur understands, that Arthur got it in one as usual.

Arthur comes over with Eames’ mug of tea and sits down again.

“Did you say Salt Lake?” Eames says, only now coming back round to Arthur’s words. “You said Utah, before, too.”

“S’where I’m from,” Arthur says, lifting a shoulder. “My family’s still there.”

“Salt Lake City,” Eames repeats wonderingly as he connects a series of rather unexpected dots, and then he lifts his mug of tea in salute. “I should have known. Cheers to your magic underwear, darling, clearly they work miracles.”

Arthur twists his mouth around ruefully but lifts his own mug in answer. “I don’t wear the garments, Eames. Never did. And no one thinks they’re magic.”

“Tell that to him,” says Eames, nodding down at his belly. “He’s a bit of proof otherwise, hmm?” He scoops the amber necklace off the table and waggles it at Arthur. “Sod the beads, you gave me the gift of Latterday semen.”

“Joseph Smith _did_ order us to be fruitful and multiply,” Arthur mutters, hiding his smile in his mug.

“Amen,” says Eames, and means it.

***

Of course it’s not that easy, not by a long shot. It’s clear that Arthur’s still spun by the whole situation, the way he keeps dropping off into long troubled silences, the way Eames catches him looking at him askance with those red tipped ears, that firm-set mouth. Eames isn’t used to feeling self-conscious, but he does, he _is_ ; impossible not to be at odds with his body when it’s been so blatantly hijacked by this tiny interloper, and scrutinized by Arthur besides.

They keep busy; Arthur helps with the things Eames hasn’t got round to, setting up Eames’ internet first of all because Arthur suffocates within hours if he’s not within signal range of a data connection of some description. Next he tackles the video monitor Eames bought and never unpacked, bolts the camera properly to the wall instead of perching it precariously on the edge of the bookcase like Eames probably would have done. After that he moves on to the usual point man tasks, though he tries to act casual about it at first. Arthur checks the exits, sighs when he finds points of weakness like unbolted windows, sets about latching and locking everything he can. He turns the knife-block on the counter so it’s within reaching distance from most points in the kitchen. He goes from room to room adjusting the draperies and blinds to maximize Eames’ view while minimizing the range of activity anyone looking in can observe.

“It’s perfectly safe,” Eames says, watching from the armchair as Arthur shoots the front door’s deadbolt home. Eames left it unlocked when he’d popped out for the mail a minute earlier. “It’s Canada. No one is violent in Canada — well, except on ice skates.”

“Hmm,” says Arthur, disagreeing, but not bothering to pretend he isn’t doing a thorough sweep at this point. “Gun safe’s in the bedroom?”

“Top of the master suite closet,” Eames concedes. “Much good it’ll do me there, but can’t have weapons lying round, you know.”

Arthur nods tersely and paces across the room, obviously looking to see what sort of household objects Eames could call upon as weapons if needed. He resembles nothing so much as an anxious dog, presently. It would be amusing if it weren’t so irritating.

“If you must see to these things,” Eames says, “do make yourself useful and patch up my online identities, will you? I didn’t want to bring the job to you but god knows you’ll find a dozen holes that need fixing.” At least Arthur will be sitting still, for this. Eames is too exhausted to watch Arthur in this state.

Arthur hesitates, not liking to change his course of action midstream, but he’s flexible and biddable as ever he is on the job. He has his laptop out, next thing, and a moment later he’s lost to the tapping of keyboard and the scroll of screen. Relieved, Eames goes on folding tiny pairs of socks, kept company inside and out with Arthur working a few feet away and the baby restless within.

The silence between them is a little more strained over dinner — Arthur, as per usual, typing with one hand and eating with the other — but eases again when Eames trades out Arthur’s takeaway carton of Chinese for a generous glass of pinot noir from an Okanagan winery a few hours away. “That one’s from Dave down the road,” says Eames. “He brought it as a welcoming gift, promised it’s a nice one and I should try it out once I’m able. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I wouldn’t.”

Arthur takes a tentative sip, lifts his eyebrows in surprised appreciation, and tips the glass up a little further next time.

Vancouver gets dark early in December, and the situation isn’t helped by the steady grim patter of rain. Eames yawns several times before he gives in and heaves himself to his feet. There are blankets in the linen closet, and a spare pillow. Eames fetches them and drops them next to Arthur’s laptop on the table. He can’t resist giving Arthur’s bowed head a helplessly fond tussle to get his attention.

“What’s this?” says Arthur, blinking away from whatever act of technological wizardry he’s performing — something to do with Eames’ Netflix account, by the look of things. “Oh,” he says, seeing the stack of blankets.

“The couch isn’t bad,” Eames says, “should it take your fancy.”

“And if it doesn’t?” Arthur half-asks, businesslike, calm and detached in spite of the loaded half-question.

“Room enough for three in mine,” Eames says, matching Arthur’s mood if not his prim tone, “if you don’t mind a pair of very restless bedmates.”

“Okay,” Arthur says, “I’m just going to,” and he doesn’t bother finishing the sentence as the browser window goes white and starts scrolling line upon line of code. “Oh, that was was easy,” he says, pleased now. “This’ll be like taking candy from a — I mean, it’ll be, uh, very easy — this is going to be easy. Easier than I thought.” His ears have gone red yet again; he buries his obvious confusion in the mouth of his wineglass.

Eames drops his hand off the crown of Arthur’s head and heads down the hall towards his bedroom, back aching, eyes bleary, stomach full to bursting though he’d managed little enough food. He scarcely knows what he hopes Arthur chooses, when Arthur is ready to sleep too. All Eames knows is that he needs to be horizontal and unconscious, soon as possible.

***

The bed is a sea of pillows, each of them critical to supporting Eames in a comfortable position long enough to let him sleep. Once duly situated, he drops off almost instantly, drained by the exertion of merely being upright and moving most of the day.

As usual, this blissful rest lasts approximately two hours before his bladder insists upon his attention. Eames groans and fights against it with fitful twitches of his arms and legs for a few seconds before abruptly remembering that Arthur might be in bed with him, might be disturbed by all this commotion. But when Eames heaves himself up on one palm and looks at the other side of the bed, the covers are flat and undisturbed. 

Arthur chose the couch, after all.

Or not, Eames realizes as he exits the toilet. There’s a faint light shining down the corridor from the kitchen. 

He follows it to its source, shuffling sleepily on the cuffs of his sagging pyjama bottoms, dignified a little by his dressing gown over them. Arthur’s not working, at least; he’s slumped cheek down on the kitchen table, asleep on the job, drooling slightly. But even like this, even unconscious and slack and awkwardly splayed over the tabletop, Arthur’s lovely. 

Eames lets himself look, now, lets himself notice what he worked hard to ignore all day: every familiar line of Arthur seeming impossibly handsomer than usual, tan from his recent travels, longish hair mussed and wild. The full soft pout of his half-open mouth. The fan of dark short lashes on the fragile skin under his eyes. The pinprick dots of stubble clustered around the underside of Arthur’s lean sharp jaw.

“Up you get,” Eames says, when Arthur blinks awake under the weight of Eames’ hand on his shoulder. “Can’t have you kipping on the kitchen table, love. Wouldn’t be proper Canadian hospitality.”

Arthur inhales sharply through his nose as he orients himself with his usual rapidity, but before he’s quite himself, his gaze catches on the open V of Eames’ hastily belted robe. “Jesus,” he says, “you’re”— and then he shuts his mouth and looks away.

“Bloated beyond all recognition?” Eames suggests with a sort of weary wry humour. “Swollen up like a puffer fish?”

Arthur looks back, meeting Eames’ gaze again, steady now. “No,” he says, almost offended. “God, no. Don’t you know how you — you look, right now?”

“I try to avoid mirrors,” Eames says, “and besides, I haven’t got one quite wide enough to take in my whole refl”— and then he has to stop because Arthur’s reaching out with one hand, pulling aside one lapel of Eames’ robe, careful to touch only the silky fabric and not Eames’ skin. For all his care, Eames shudders anyway, because the inside of the robe is dragging over his chest, and the early tenderness of pregnancy has more recently given way to a sort of heavy sensuality. It feels nice, nicer than Arthur could guess, that glide of silk over taut breast. “God, careful, careful,” Eames says hotly. “You’ll get me in a state, and then where will we be?”

“What kind of state?” Arthur asks, like his throat is dry. The words are low, soft, fascinated. He strokes the open lapel of Eames’ robe a little more firmly, curving it to the side so it cups round the contour of Eames’ exposed breast, his hard nipple. “Holy shit, that’s — wow. How does that feel?”

“Just as you’d expect,” Eames says, suddenly finding it difficult to think, because Arthur’s pupils have gone wider, his breath is quickening, and this is an utterly unlooked for upside of Arthur’s unannounced visit. “Like you’ve got tits, suddenly — proper, real tits.”

“That’s not what I was asking,” Arthur says, and uses his free hand to get Eames by the small of the back, urge him in closer to where Arthur’s sitting. His palm glides up, then, and pulls Eames’ upper body in closer to his face, his — his mouth. “I meant, how does it feel from this side? Can I”— and without really waiting for Eames’ blessing, Arthur nuzzles in close, scraping stubble and seeking lips and the flash of even perfect teeth, and he drags it all over the arch of Eames’ breast, makes a soft hungry sound and opens his mouth over the bud of Eames’ dark rosy areola.

“Arthur, Arthur,” Eames half-warns, half-pleads, but his traitorous hand is already carding through the soft curls at the back of Arthur’s head, pinning him in place. His body wants this, desperately, and doesn’t seem to be fussed about the mixed signals, here: suck of mouth at his waiting breast, pyjama bottoms brushing against his rising cock, because Arthur feels amazing, smells perfect, is gorgeous and hot and touching Eames like he really _wants_ to touch Eames, like he’s been holding back just like Eames has been holding himself back from throwing himself all over Arthur.

Arthur breaks his hold with a delightful wet noise, tilts his head back, and he’s gone now, flushed and heavy-lidded and dimpling with pleasure. “I like your proper, real tits.”

Eames unknots his robe and shrugs out of it, hurrying now. “I’ve got two of them, as it happens,” he says, probably embarrassingly eager, but god. _God_. It’s far too long since Eames has been touched, even by his own hands; sometimes his hormones all but demand it, but he’s rarely been in the mood for wanking, too bothered by the way his body’s changed. Now, suddenly, with Arthur looking up at him like this, Eames is unthinkingly desperate to come. He doesn’t give a shit that it’s going to be —

“Shouldn’t we take this to the bedroom?” Arthur asks, when Eames grabs his hand and shoves it down the front of his pyjama bottoms. “Not that I — oh, god, you’re like iron, fuck. How did you get so hard so fast, is that a pregnancy — oh, god, Eames, are you really going to”—

Eames clutches hard at Arthur’s shoulders, breath catching as he comes just from the few strokes Arthur’s managed. It’s hot and sudden and weird, not like any orgasm Eames can remember having. His cock contracts, pulses, but — of course, thirty-eight weeks gone and awash in a sea of hormones — Eames doesn’t ejaculate.

“Oh, that’s _cool_ ,” Arthur says appreciatively, grinning. “It’s like you’re running a new OS, all of a sudden.” He rubs his hand up and down, easing Eames down. “Should I stop? Your hard-on isn’t — I mean, you’re still fucking _sprung_ , here.”

“Did you just compare me to a laptop?” Eames asks, shaking and pleased and filled with goodwill. “And no, don’t stop, just — slower, for a minute.”

“I really, really like laptops,” Arthur points out, moving his hand more slowly, shifting from actively working Eames’ cock to just lazily groping it. “It’s a compliment.” He ducks in close and starts in on Eames’ chest again, and Eames closes his eyes, blissful, drifting on a slow burn of arousal now that some of the urgency has been stripped away. “So, you could fuck me for a really long time, like this,” he murmurs against Eames’ skin when he pulls back for a moment, and yes, of course Arthur’s mind would go there: Arthur, who to Eames’ knowledge has never once been fucked long enough to truly satisfy him.

“If only you could get onto my dick, I could,” Eames says, amused. This time when Arthur ducks back in to mouth at Eames, there’s a weird shivery prickling sensation all over his breasts, and then — “Oh, shit, take care, darling.”

Arthur pulls away looking like a startled cat, blinking at Eames’ breast. His mouth is wet, and he swipes at it with the back of his hand before leaning back in and using the tip of his tongue to lap at Eames. “New OS,” he says, backing off and tasting his lips again. “Everything’s been rewired.” He looks up at Eames again. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to —“

—“No, it’s good practice,” Eames says, amused. “Just — if you want to suck on me, maybe aim a little lower?”

Arthur drags his hands down Eames’ sides and round his front, long fingers splayed over the round of Eames’ belly. He hooks Eames’ pyjama bottoms with his thumbs and lifts them down and away so they fall puddled to the floor. He has to tilt his head a little to get a look at Eames’ cock, which is kissed up against the lower curve of Eames’ middle, leaking steadily. “You can’t call it pre-come,” Arthur says, lifting it away and getting back to stroking it. “You’re just — wet.”

“Mm, very much so,” Eames says, rolling his hips into Arthur’s grip. “How about that bed, now?”

“Yeah,” says Arthur, “yeah, let’s,” but he’s talking with that sweetly dazed tone he gets when he’s truly focused on a task, and it’s no surprise when he kneels down off his chair instead of rising, when he kisses down from Eames’ navel and licks around Eames’ foreskin, and Eames can’t see a bloody thing but he can feel it all.

***

“This isn’t going to make you go into labour, is it?” asks Arthur, albeit asking a bit after the fact since he’s been fucking Eames steady and hard as the position will allow for some time now.

Eames looks over his shoulder at Arthur, sees him pink-cheeked and sweaty and frowning ever so slightly. “God, I hope so,” Eames says, hooking a hand back to hold Arthur steady for a kiss. “I fear that the universe would never be so kind, though.”

“You’re kind of done with this whole thing,” Arthur half-asks, breaking away and curving his fingers round Eames’ hip as best he can, pulling out and resettling his weight along Eames’ back and side before thrusting back in, deep and perfect. “For what it’s worth, it’s a good look on you.”

“You’ve made that opinion quite, ah — ah, jesus, Arthur — quite apparent,” Eames answers, rolling his arse back into Arthur’s thrusts. He’s being a little lazy about the whole thing, he knows, but he’s already come three times and he’s not optimistic about a fourth, everlasting hard-on and hormones notwithstanding. Coming seems like work, somehow, like something Eames might have to try hard to achieve when it’s perfectly lovely to just lie here and let Arthur have his wicked way with him.

“Don’t fall asleep, Eames,” warns Arthur. “Eames.” He nudges his face into the place between Eames’ shoulder and his jaw, scraping his own faint beard against Eames’ own. “Stay awake until I come.”

“Course I will,” Eames agrees cheerily with eyes closed. “Will you be very long, do you think?”

“Oh, that’s it, I’m making you come again, too,” Arthur says, sounding somewhere between amused and determined. His hand closes around Eames’ cock and starts working him slick and fast as he fucks into Eames. “Bet I can make you shoot.”

“Can’t,” Eames says, but he’s been pulled back from the brink of sleep, at least. Incapable of tumbling into sleep, suddenly, with Arthur around and inside and heavy behind and over him. “But don’t beat yourself up, darling, it’s just a physiological impossibility at this juncture.”

“Bet I can, bet I can make you spill all over your belly and the sheets and my hand, make me all wet and hot and slippery with your spunk, you,” Arthur says, shoving Eames’ knee up to get a better angle, not missing a beat as he goes back to jerking Eames off, “your balls are getting so tight and high, Eames, you’re going to do this.”

“Can’t,” Eames says, barely able to breathe between the upwards press of his belly and the downwards crushing weight of Arthur fucking him. “But that feels amazing, that’s lovely and perfect, Arthur.”

“Come on, Eames, do it, do it,” Arthur says, switching suddenly to a series of hard deep thrusts, slower but unrelenting, each one pushing an unwilling noise from Eames’ throat. “You can.”

“Can’t,” maintains Eames, “but I might come dry again anyway, god, just — almost there, ah.”

Arthur’s got to be desperate now, himself, gone steely-eyed and a bit mad-looking but not yielding as he pumps into Eames faster again, new angle. He’s out of meaningful words, down to half-uttered repetitions of _do it, c’mon, c’mon_.

Eames clamps down around Arthur’s cock and grates out a cry, because he’s going to come again, he’s going to — he is, he feels it building in his balls like it hasn’t in weeks and months, he’s — 

“Oh, yeah, Eames, yes,” Arthur says, shaky and amazed and insufferably smug already even as Eames tenses and comes, pulsing out weakly once, twice, and that’s all. Eames can’t see it but he feels Arthur’s fingers gone slick now, and he can’t move, suddenly. He’s spent, in every sense. “See?” says Arthur, with audible smirk, and then he comes all at once, as though moved to orgasm by his own tenacity and success and sexual brilliance.

“Shut up,” Eames tells him, after Arthur’s done kissing Eames’ mouth, all sloppy and fond and off-centre. “Save your self-congratulatory nonsense for someone who’ll appreciate it, you”—

—“I’ve never been so proud of making someone’s boner go _away_ ,” Arthur muses, beaming, fondling Eames’ (indeed, softening at last) cock. “Oh, and I was thinking, if you lay flat on your back and I sort of straddled you backwards and leaned forward a little, I think we could probably fuck that way. I’ll google it, later; we can’t be the first ones in this situation, after all.”

“Hm,” Eames agrees, dissolving into a post-coital puddle of sleep. His breasts are leaking again, but the bedding’s a lost cause anyway. Eames will sleep on every wet spot ever if it means not having to move.

***

“When did you say your flight was?” asks Eames, speckled with paint and pleasantly sore for a change, taking a moment to appreciate Arthur’s arse in worn jeans where he’s standing on a chair to paint near the ceiling.

“I didn’t say,” Arthur says, “but I missed it. About —“ and here he checks his watch — “oh, six hours ago.”

Eames should probably say something about this. Instead he cranes his neck up and says, “Oi, you missed that bit by the window frame, you lazy sod.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Arthur grumbles through a barely-repressed smile, and that’s that.

***

“Oh, hello, it’s you! Cindy, this is my friend Arthur,” Eames says, standing sway-backed in the foyer, still faintly breathless from his walk to the door. “He’s come for a visit.”

If Arthur’s put off by being called ‘friend’ he doesn’t show it, just smiles politely and extends a hand and says hello.

“Cindy lives just up the road,” Eames tells Arthur. “She gave me the name of my doula. Got two kids at home, herself.”

Cindy pulls a comically fraught expression and nods, breaking into a smile. “Nice to meet you, Arthur. Tristan, I just thought I’d see how you were doing but if you’ve got company”—

—“Nonsense,” Eames demurs. “Come in, Arthur’s fetched some lovely coffee from the organic shop, he’ll brew you a proper cup. I’m making bread, it’ll be done in ten minutes.”

“So domestic,” marvels Cindy. “You’re putting all the other moms to shame.”

Eames smiles and waves her in, ignoring the way Arthur mouths _Tristan?_ behind her back and then makes a terrible gagging face. “Do you want to see how the nursery’s progressing? Arthur’s been a wonderful help, it’s nearly done now.”

“It had better be,” says Cindy, casting a look back at Eames. “You look like you’re going to burst any second.”

“Feel like it, too,” Eames agrees with a sigh, “but not so much as a lonely Braxton-Hicks, thus far.”

“Are you staying around after the baby comes, Arthur?” asks Cindy, all innocence.

Arthur clears his throat and lifts a shoulder, averting his gaze. “I’m kind of better with paintbrushes and screwdrivers than with diapers and — those sorts of things.”

“Arthur’s line of work involves preparation more than execution,” Eames says, trying to work past the awkwardness quickly. “But he’s brilliant with planning.”

Arthur can’t stifle the proud little smile that pops onto his face in answer to this statement, and Eames in turn can’t quite help the way he reaches out and squeezes Arthur’s upper arm, trails fingers down to stroke Arthur’s hand. Cindy doesn’t miss a thing; this will have all the mums on the street buzzing for days.

***

“Tristan?” says Arthur, later.

“Mm, what?” Eames responds, distracted, and then blinks up from _What to Expect_ to realize that Arthur’s not calling him by his assumed alias, he’s questioning it.

“Could you have picked a worse name?” Arthur asks, grimacing down at the frying pan, wreathed in rising steam.

“It’s not like you didn’t see it on my Facebook profile, darling,” Eames points out.

“I didn’t realize you were _using_ it, though,” Arthur protests as he reaches for the pepper grinder. “I thought you’d just keep using your last name like always.”

“First off,” Eames says, “that’s hardly a good security practice, and secondly, I have it on good authority that normal non-criminal non-celebrity non-military types don’t swan around demanding that people address them by their last names.”

“Fine,” concedes Arthur. He’s doing a fry-up of some description. The bacon smells marvellous; Eames’ stomach gives an ambitious growl though he’s not got much of an appetite these days. “But Tristan? _Tristan?_ ”

“I was saving the good ones for the sprog,” Eames says. “I got stuck with the reject pile for myself.”

“What’s on the list?” Arthur asks. “For the baby, I mean.” He adds more ground pepper to the frying pan, busy and matter-of-fact and sounding only marginally interested. 

“I’ll show it to you later,” Eames says, dropping back into his reading. Then something makes him hesitate, and when he looks up again he catches the faint line of tension in Arthur’s shoulders even as Arthur seems absorbed by his cooking. “You get a say, of course,” Eames tells him, deciding on the spot. “And you have veto power, darling.”

“No, I,” Arthur says confusedly, then looks back at Eames. “Really? You wouldn’t mind?”

“I’d be honoured,” says Eames, and means it. “So long as you don’t start campaigning for him to be called Dominic.”

Arthur breaks into a genuine grin. “I promise, not Dominic.”

“Or Charles,” Eames adds. “Or Robert, come to that.”

Arthur pushes the bacon around the pan, returning to his task, but he’s still smiling as he does so.

***

“Are we sure this is meant to work?” Eames asks doubtfully, looking down at what he can see of Arthur beyond the overwhelming landscape of his own belly: Arthur’s head down and arse up and casting an impatient look over his shoulder. “I’m not sure my cock can find your arse blind like this.”

“All the sites say this is our best bet,” Arthur says, “since it’s not comfortable for you, lying on your back.” He reaches back and gets Eames by the cock, urges him forward. “Rest your belly on my lower back, I’ll handle this part.”

“Can’t we just use a dildo?” asks Eames. “I have a thigh harness, I could fuck you that way.”

“Come on, stop being such a pussy,” Arthur says, rolling his eyes and laughing. “Fuck me, Tristan.”

“Oh, do shut up,” Eames says, and wiggles closer until his middle is pressed into the small of Arthur’s back. Arthur makes a pleased sound and rolls his hips up, holds Eames’ cock steady and pushes himself back onto it. He can’t get all of it in, quite, but it feels lovely anyway, being inside Arthur after all this time.

“Fuck, that’s it, that’s awesome,” Arthur says with sincere appreciation. “Eames, you’ve got a fucking great cock, I’ve missed it.”

“I quite miss it, myself,” Eames says, thrusting hesitantly because it feels alien, somehow, doing this in this body. It’s like he’s forging and doing it badly besides. “It’s ages since I saw it with my own eyes. I have to sit down to piss.”

“Can we not,” Arthur asks. “Oh, yeah, there. Eames, oh.”

And Eames would put up with a great deal of cognitive dissonance to make Arthur sound like that, so he gamely balances his weight against Arthur, ignores his aching back and his put-upon knees, his jiggling chest. He feels more than a little ridiculous, out of breath and straining, but Arthur is going pink down his neck and clutching at the sheets, and Eames will fuck Arthur long as he’s able.

This turns out to be just shy of five minutes.

“Sorry, darling,” Eames says, flopped onto his side and torn between relief and disappointment. “That was a bit crap.”

“It was a fucking great ride while it lasted,” Arthur answers with a diplomatic smile, reaching across the space between them to finger Eames’ mouth. “Thanks for trying, babe.”

“Should I get the dildo?” Eames asks. “I think I could go longer on my side with that.”

“No,” says Arthur, reaching down and pushing at his still-hard cock, encouraging it to go down a little. “Let’s just take a break, we’ve done a lot of fucking the last few days.”

“Yeah,” agrees Eames with a pleased smile. “Bloody wonderful. Best houseguest in the world, I reckon.”

Arthur smiles back and rests his hand on Eames again, abandoning his slowly flagging cock. He strokes over Eames’ chest, which is well-known territory to him at this point, and then moves — more tentatively — to Eames’ belly. He’s mostly avoided it, before now; indeed, when Eames stops to think about it, he thinks Arthur’s first proper direct contact with Eames’ middle was five minutes earlier as it came to bear on the sweet sway above Arthur’s arse. “It’s harder than I thought it would be,” Arthur says quietly. “I guess it’s full of baby now.”

“Hm,” agrees Eames, liking the stroke of Arthur’s fingertips over strained taut skin. The touch is making his nipples peak, the hair stand up on his arms, like his body is coming to attention on Arthur’s order. “Yeah, it wasn’t like this a month ago.” He takes Arthur’s hand and presses it flat, low down on the bottommost curve. “There’s his head. Hardest of all.”

“Takes after his mom,” Arthur says, still in that soft voice. His fingers press in to feel the hard arch of bone.

Eames shifts Arthur’s hand up again, just in time for him to catch the push and roll of a buttock or maybe a heel. “Restless little bugger.”

“Takes after his dad, too,” Arthur says, pushing back, sleepy and attentive all at once. “That’s so weird. You have tiny eyelashes in there. Tiny earlobes. And a tiny pair of balls.”

“Not so tiny, you should have seen the last ultrasound,” Eames corrects him. “Our son is hung like a donkey by the looks of things.”

“That’s my boy,” Arthur says, pleased, and then his expression goes carefully flat, neutral as he takes in what he’s just said.

“I was thinking of Albert,” Eames says, to break the tense silence that’s sprung up. “Your last name, so he’s named for both of us.”

“Albert’s a terrible first name,” Arthur says, bursting into a grin. “Good fucking god, Eames. Vetoed.”

“Oh, can’t you see it, though?” Eames wheedles. “Little Bertie Eames?”

“Sounds like a music hall star,” Arthur says. “Hell, no.”

Eames might be exhausted and sore and half-asleep but there’s nearly always energy in him to wind Arthur up a bit, so he draws a great breath and expends it on an obnoxious extended note of introduction: “Aaaaaah’m [Burlington Bertie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lN1JxKPYrJY), I rise at ten thirty and saunter along like a toff. I walk down the Strand with my gloves on my hands, then I walk down again with them _orff_.”

Arthur giggles and groans, shaking his head helplessly the whole time Eames sings the first verse, another chorus, another verse. “You actually are a bottomless pit of useless arcane knowledge, aren’t you?” he asks when Eames resorts to humming the third verse before coming round to the chorus again.

“It’s a lovely name, Bertie,” says Eames, taking this as a concession of defeat on Arthur’s part. Bertie turns fitfully and gives Arthur’s hand a boot by way of agreement. “God, I hope he has your dimples.”

“I hate my dimples,” says Arthur, flashing them anyway.

“They utterly do me in,” Eames says, unthinking.

There’s a long painful moment in which Arthur’s gaze drops away and he blinks slowly, twice, three times. Then he pulls his hand back and rolls over to look at the clock. “You sleep, I’ll shower and finish the paint touch-ups in the nursery.” His voice is light, casual. He hesitates again, though, as he sits up on the edge of the mattress. “It’s nearly done, I think.”

“It is,” agrees Eames. “Cheers for all the work, darling. I expect you’ll be continuing on to Utah when it’s finished?”

Arthur nods as he grabs his boxers off the floor, still facing the other way. “Yeah, that’d be. Probably, huh.” He looks back over his shoulder, quick and nervous. “Right?”

Eames breathes in slowly, sleepily, and lets himself smile at Arthur — Arthur, uncertain and young-looking and somewhere between anxious and regretful. “Right,” Eames tells him, firmly, reaching over to squeeze Arthur’s arm. “It’s been lovely, having you here, but you’d best be on your way before it gets — complicated.”

“Yeah,” Arthur half-sighs, relieved or reluctant or both. “Yeah, of course.” He stands up and pulls his boxers up over his thighs, his arse, stoops down and snaps up a t-shirt. Eames watches him through sleepy half-lidded eyes, a little envious over the easy stretch and shift of Arthur’s lean lovely body, graceful and athletic and loose-limbed. He can admit it to himself, that he’ll miss Arthur, the warm solidity of him, his stability and pragmatism and his grouchy sounds over misbehaving technology and his scattered empty coffee cups everywhere. But tomorrow makes thirty-nine weeks, and they both know it’s long past time for Arthur to make his exit.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Notes: contains (rather vague handwavy) descriptions of labour and childbirth.

Arthur’s never doubted Eames’ ability to make friends. Eames forms instantaneous and easy bonds with people everywhere he goes — or drives them off, as he chooses. He’s like a magnet, he seemingly only needs to decide whether he wants to attract or repel, to lure somebody in close enough to lift their wallet or to wind them up until they’re ready to strike.

So it’s no surprise that Eames has every person on the block popping by to check on him, chatting over tea, trading parenting tips and pregnancy advice and reminding him of things to steal from the hospital when being discharged. Eames is in full-strength charming mode, laughing with these other mothers, frowning and listening intently to their stories, holding their drooling babies and insisting they have one more piece of banana bread, that they take some with them for their husband or wife at home.

Arthur hovers in the background, doing his best to quash his point-man impulse towards becoming faceless, formless. He wants to melt into the quiet shadowy spaces of Eames’ cheerful rental bungalow and let Eames have the stage. But this isn’t, he tells himself sternly, a job they’re pulling. This isn’t a heist, and these young earnest mothers aren’t their marks. Eames isn’t forging anything, he’s not pulling a long con, and Arthur needs to stop twitching his hand against his thigh to feel the shape of his totem, the absence of his gun.

This is real; more to the point, this is the real Eames: chatty, smiling, baking, gestating Eames. Eames with this bizarre and implausibly lovely eruption of curves, Eames folding sleepers over the globe of his belly, Eames looking tired and dazed and so, so happy as he turns pages in the well-worn baby name book.

“I’m Colin,” says the latest visitor when Eames excuses himself to the bathroom for the third time in as many hours. “Sorry, I didn’t get your name?”

Arthur stands up and sets the screwdriver down on the kitchen counter, reaches across and shakes hands. Colin is about his own age but he’s wearing yoga pants and a UBC sweatshirt. There’s a patchy white stain over one shoulder, and a very small baby snugged up against his front in a wrap. “Arthur,” says Arthur, because that’s how Eames has been introducing him. “I’m Tristan’s friend.”

“Tristan’s handy friend,” amends Colin, nodding over at where Arthur’s been diligently attaching all the baby-proof latches to the cupboards. “My wife and I are terrible at this stuff, Wendy’s nearly three months old and everything’s still in the plastic packages.”

“You went first?” Arthur asks, because it seems like the thing in this sort-of-hippie crunchy granola neighbourhood where Eames has landed. The parents take turns having babies — rah, rah, equality, and so on. It’s a world away from Arthur’s own family where the mothers are all women, but then Vancouver isn’t Salt Lake.

“First, and second, and third, if I’m up for it,” Colin says, instead. “I’m the maternal type. Elisabeth isn’t.” He smiles and sways a little, side to side, even though his baby isn’t making any kind of fuss. “Like you and Tristan, I think?”

“Oh,” says Arthur, because he’s really crappy at improvising. “Well.”

“Don’t worry,” says Colin, “not everyone’s a baby person. They turn into people, eventually. This is just a phase, this drooly poopy wobbly thing.”

“Yeah,” says Arthur, feeling oddly caught out. The toilet flushes. “Some people are born to be,” he says, more than a little awkwardly, and then finishes with a gesture towards the open cupboard door next to him. “I should, uh.”

“Please tell me my bladder will be my own again soon,” says Eames, reappearing. “It’s twenty minutes just to get up again, and by that time I’m bursting. I may as well spend the day on the bog.”

* * *

Arthur, who’s flying out in two days’ time, drives Eames to the obstetrician’s office and drops him off at the kerb. He idles for a moment rather than swinging round to the parking garage under the building.

“Why don’t you go round the corner and get a latte?” suggests Eames as he struggles his way out of the car. “It’s always ages before I’m seen, anyway. Perils of socialized health care.”

Arthur acquiesces readily enough, though he still looks torn with muffled worry when Eames at last heaves himself out the passenger door and finds his footing on the pavement. “Text when you’re done,” Arthur says. “Or sooner, if you need anything.”

It is indeed a long wait, but Eames came prepared. He spends the first half-hour responsibly reading his book on male lactation, then gets bored and switches over to a novel. Arthur texts him once to check in, and Eames replies with reassurances that he hasn’t even been taken to the exam room yet. _Have another cup, dear,_ Eames adds. Arthur doesn’t answer this time.

It’s an amazing and ridiculous fact that obstetricians — these years-in-the-making licensed health care professionals — literally measure the size of a belly to judge the readiness of the baby inside. One centimeter of belly from navel to pubis is meant to equal one week of gestational preparedness. This seems either quite an extraordinary evolutionary endorsement of the metric system, or a load of utter bollocks. Eames has got used to the procedure, anyway — and it’s miles ahead of the indignity and discomfort of internal exams, of the stirrups. 

“Forty centimeters,” says Eames’ physician, pulling the tape away from Eames’ stomach and making a note on the chart. “Well, he’s definitely ready to come out. I’m prepared to schedule you for an induction, hmm—“ and he checks the calendar on the wall. “Well, tomorrow if you want.”

“What — tomorrow?” Eames blurts, startled. He wasn’t anticipating this discussion, not with Arthur still here, round the corner drinking lattes. “No! I’ve got a week left.”

The doctor smiles and shakes his head. “You’re full-term at this point, and you know it can be a bit risky, waiting for natural labour for a nulliparous male of your age. The longer the baby gestates, the bigger he gets, the more trouble you could potentially have delivering him naturally. His head’s engaged, he’s facing the right way, he’s certainly big enough. I mean, if that’s what you want, we can wait. But I’d feel a bit better about kickstarting things, to be honest. We could start with a soft approach — there’s a topical cervical treatment we can do on an outpatient basis that encourages you to efface and dilate a bit, that’s often enough to trigger contractions. And if that’s not enough, we could discuss admitting you and starting you on an oxytocin drip the next day.”

“No, no,” Eames repeats, wide-eyed, shocked. “No, thanks, I really do want to wait for — I mean, the baby can decide when he’s — ready.”

The doctor nods easily enough, though the concerned cut of his mouth isn’t the least bit reassuring. “Right, okay. Well, there are a few things you can try to speed things along naturally — spicy foods, moderate physical activity. Would you be game to try some homeopathic approaches? Evening primrose oil and raspberry leaf have shown some good clinical results. I can give you a list.” He reaches for a binder and rifles through it, tugs a photocopied page free. “Oh, and penetrative sex often does the trick, too.”

“Well, if that worked, I’d be holding a baby already,” Eames answers absently, and flashes a grin he doesn’t feel, quite, at the doctor.

“If at first you don’t succeed,” the doctor answers, smiling back. “Okay, we’ll see you in a week if nothing happens. Otherwise, maybe at the hospital?”

“Yeah, thanks,” Eames says, awkwardly slipping down from the examination table.

Arthur’s got an herbal tea waiting in the cupholder for Eames. “How was it?” he asks, politely.

“Good,” Eames says, omitting the whole ‘we could induce you tomorrow’ discussion. “Can we stop at a chemist’s? There are some things I’m meant to take this week.”

“Yeah, let’s grab lunch while we’re out, too,” Arthur suggests, pulling out into traffic.

“Not curry,” Eames says. “Or Mexican.”

“Since when are you so picky,” Arthur smirks, casting a glance at him.

Eames pulls a blandly innocent face and fails to answer.

***

Arthur’s last night, they have teppanyaki; or rather, _Arthur_ has teppanyaki. 

Eames orders with great enthusiasm, watches their purple-haired chef painstakingly fry his pancake to his exact specifications, golden and crispy and dripping with teriyaki sauce, with two perfect gooey mochi rectangles at its heart. It looks amazing, smells even better when it lands on Eames’ plate. Eames dissects out a corner of it with his chopsticks while Arthur attacks his own dish — and then abruptly comes to the realization that food is revolting. Eames doesn’t know why anyone ever puts anything in their mouths, voluntarily.

“I thought you were starving,” says Arthur when he finally lifts his face away from his plate long enough to notice Eames’ hesitation.

“I was,” Eames says, and feels the gnaw of his stomach afresh. “I am,” he revises, grimacing. “Only”—

—“If you’re not eating it, I am,” says Arthur heartlessly, reaching over the table, pulling at the crisp lacy edge of egg and cabbage and chicken to get at the dazzling white toffee-gum stretch of mochi. “Oh my god, I love Vancouver.”

“Mm,” agrees Eames, and forces himself to drink a little more jasmine rice tea though his brain is rejecting even that offering. He’s read about this but didn’t believe it would happen to him: some men go off their food shortly before labour. Eames has been avoiding spicy fare for no good reason, it seems; worse yet, he’d refused Arthur one last fuck before they left the house, out of some vague misplaced fear that this would be the time that finally tipped Eames over into contractions.

“Can we get bubble tea, after?” Arthur asks, mouth half-full, now alternating between his own plate and Eames’. Denied sex, Arthur will seek out more calorically-based satisfaction; Eames has observed as much before. From the look of Arthur, of course, it’s fairly apparent that he’s rarely had to settle for food over orgasms.

“Yeah, if you like,” says Eames distractedly; he’s just noticed that a family several tables over is casting them fond looks like Eames and Arthur make them as gooey and soft inside as Eames’ mochi teppanyaki. They look like young marrieds out for their last night as a childless couple, Eames supposes. The mother is absently stroking soft curls back from the forehead of her youngest, who looks to be about two. It’s difficult to say if nostalgia or relief is her predominant emotion; both seem to be warring for position on her face.

“Unless you’re not feeling well,” Arthur is saying now, pausing between bites, frowning at Eames. “Eam—“ and he has to hesitate, check himself before he gets it wrong, “Tristan, did you want to go home? Are you okay?”

“No, I’m fine, darling,” Eames assures him. “My eyes are bigger than my stomach, it seems,” and then he has to cast a comedic look down at himself, his straining shirt, his heavy splay-legged sprawl on his chair. “So to speak.”

“If you’re sure,” says Arthur, popping another shrimp in his mouth. “Oh, we have to go to that place where they use fresh mango. Do you remember where that place is?”

It’s not until later, when Arthur’s grabbing an oversized straw and dropping it into the domed lid of his bubble tea, that Eames feels the first of the labour pains: it’s just a faint rolling sense of tension, mild far-away discomfort, a few moments’ breathless surprise, and then it’s over. 

Arthur’s hollowing his cheeks round his straw, eyes closed with bubble tea bliss; he misses the whole thing.

***

“Sorry, sorry,” Arthur half-whispers muzzily, reaching over the side of the bed and collecting his chiming phone from the floor. He knocked it off the night table a second earlier in his first moments of consciousness. It’s still pitch dark out, but his flight leaves early this morning. “Go back to sleep,” Arthur says, leaning back in to kiss Eames’ temple before he throws the covers off and gets up. “I’ll wake you up again after I shower and finish packing.”

Eames lets his eyelids close, does a bit of a showy flutter of lashes against cheeks, and listens as Arthur gathers his things and stumbles towards the bathroom. The water starts up, the shower curtain glides open and shut, and Arthur’s feet thump into the tub. Eames opens his eyes again and lets his face drop out of its mask of stillness, of slumber, lets himself wince a little and breathe out harder than he’s dared to do all night. Here’s another pain, and it’s not polite and standing aside waiting for Eames to notice, not like the first dozen or so. This pain is demanding all Eames’ focus as it ripples down his middle in stages, hard clenching rolls of tension. It eases off little by little, leaving Eames a bit sweaty and not a little breathless.

Eames lifts his head and checks the clock: twenty-three minutes since the last one, still not nearly time to call the doula or the doctor. It’s fine, it’s bearable, and it’ll be a lot better once Arthur’s out the door and Eames is free to get through each pain without masking its very existence. He’ll be able to walk round, let gravity help, keep busy and distracted and mobile until it’s finally time to call a taxi and make his way to the hospital.

For now, though, Eames lets his breath settle back into regularity and hopes that Arthur’s shower is either five minutes long, or twenty-five minutes long.

He must drift off after all, because suddenly Arthur is over him, dressed and neat and smiling with the smallest edge of sadness at the corners of his mouth. “I’m on my way,” he says, rubbing Eames’ shoulder. “Anything you’d like me to do before I go? Take out the garbage, maybe?”

“No,” Eames says, peering over at the clock — it’s been another twenty-two minutes, Arthur’s got to leave straightaway. “Thanks, you’ve been lovely though. Loads of help. Travel safe, hmm?”

Arthur leans in and kisses Eames’ mouth, and Eames does his best to kiss back in a sleepy pleased way instead of with the haste and distraction he’s feeling. “Text me when he comes,” Arthur says against Eames’ lips, “please? And send a photo?”

“Yeah, course,” Eames says, and for a weird terrifying moment he’s half a breath away from saying _stay, don’t go, Arthur, stay, please_. 

But Arthur pulls back and flashes an easy smile, no trace of regret this time, and Eames can’t do anything but smile up at him in answer. 

“Happy Christmas,” says Eames instead. “Have a wonderful holiday, hope you log some good hours of proselytizing in Temple Square while you’re home.”

“I never did a mission,” says Arthur, amused. “Okay, we’ll talk soon. I’ll call when I land, or something.” His hand, which has been gently braced against Eames’ shoulder, slips down unexpectedly. Arthur keeps the gesture killingly casual, but there’s no mistaking it: one last fond stroke over Eames’ chest and then Arthur’s long fingers and wide palm splaying out over Eames’ belly. “Bye,” Arthur says in a quiet way, his expression difficult to make out in the dim light of predawn, shifted now so his face is in shadow.

Eames makes his huff of breath sound like a sleepy laugh. Arthur’s hand comes away not a moment too soon as another contraction begins to build.

At last is there’s the click of the front door, the metallic thunk of the deadbolt shooting closed (because Arthur made an electronic keyless entry lock a priority on his list of tasks) — and then the roll of Arthur’s suitcase down the walk, the cough and purr of his rental car. The engine’s rumble fades to a hum and then nothingness. 

Eames pulls his knees up and exhales between clenched teeth and thinks of clouds blowing over mountaintops, shadows rolling over sunlit fields. River currents skating over smooth timeworn rocks.

When his head clears again, Eames gets up slowly, gets dressed, combs his hair, washes his face. Arthur forgot his shower gel in the tub, or maybe decided there wasn’t enough of it left to be worth packing. The scent of it is still hanging in the humid air of the bathroom.

* * *

It’s early enough that there’s not much traffic on the way to the airport. Arthur drives in a bit of a haze. It doesn’t feel like Christmas Eve, this wet grey dim day. It’ll hit him when he lands in Utah, probably. There’ll be snow, and decorations, and good food. Family. Wave upon wave of nieces and nephews, varying in activity by age: teens flopped over couches with phones or iPods in hand, tweens giggling and talking endlessly, kids alternating between crying fights and noisy play, and toddlers wandering like tiny dementia patients, sticky-handed and perpetually underfoot. And babies in arms, babies being handed off from person to person, jostled and cooed over and —

—Arthur pulls over on Marine Drive and leans his forehead against the steering wheel, exhaling. He has three burner credit cards in the lining of his suitcase, still. He’ll book a flight somewhere else, anywhere else. Fuck Utah. Fuck Christmas. Fuck snow and decorations and food and — goddamn babies.

Arthur throws the car into gear and hits the signal to pull back into traffic.

At the airport Arthur returns the rental car, buys a coffee — Starbucks, not fucking Tim Hortons — and stands on the departures level staring at the flight board, trying to settle on a destination. 

Not everyone’s a baby person. And it’s not Arthur’s problem if Eames _is_. This is what Eames wants. Arthur’s only doing what Eames wants.

So he’s going to spend motherfucking Christmas on a beach somewhere. Honolulu, maybe. Cancun. Miami. Hell, he’s in Canada, might as well go to Varadero from here. Cheap rum and old cars and no other Americans, sounds pretty good to Arthur right now. He fiddles with the handle of his suitcase and thinks about connections through Pearson in Toronto, travel time, getting a hotel on the other end. Oceanfront hotel or something more private? He’s had good luck with both, but — 

The thing is that underneath it all, under all the sleek smiles and teasing and loud clothes, Eames’ real self has turned out to be wildly, insanely different from what Arthur’s always thought. Eames is maternal and a home-body and truly, deeply content to spend hours reading up on cloth diapering versus disposables. Eames is domestic and cozy and he _bakes_. He’s nothing like the Eames Arthur’s known all these years; or rather, the Eames Arthur’s known all these years hasn’t really been Eames at all, not the real Eames.

It’s baffling and weird and — and worst of all, it’s revealed Arthur for what _he_ really is: this selfish spoiled detached child, this — this fucking asshole who’s deliberating over tropical resorts when he’s abandoning the mother of his — Arthur steels himself, thinks it for the first time — the mother of Arthur’s _son_. Eames is alone, and it doesn’t matter if he’s got a hundred new best friends down the street, twenty hired midwives and doulas in the room with him, Eames is alone. Arthur’s leaving him alone.

Arthur’s leaving both of them alone.

He’s gotten used to thinking of himself as a criminal. Arthur’s surprised and not a little annoyed to discover that he is far less comfortable thinking of himself as a deadbeat father.

* * *

It actually isn't nearly as painful as Eames feared, being in labour. Probably nothing will seem daunting after that time in Latvia with the bullets and the spoon and the shaky chemist crouched over Eames hissing "for god's sake, quiet, quiet!" as he dug around for the two slugs in Eames' side. 

You're not meant to remember pain, that's one of God's little gifts, right up there with oral sex. But fucking hell, Latvia. Eames will never properly shake the _idea_ of Latvia if not the specific sensation of it, the sheer wrongness of the stainless steel curve kissing bare and slippery sickly sweet against raw nerves, torn muscles and sinew. 

Eames doesn't consider himself a hard man, even with all he's done in his life, but it chokes him with something like shame to remember how he'd lost all sense of dignity, of stoicism, how he'd squeezed his eyes shut and arched his back against cold dirty wet concrete and called out for his mother – his _mother_ of all people, who'd never saved him a moment's pain that he remembers. 

So – contractions. They're really a doddle by comparison. Eames lounges round the house all morning, his bag packed and ready by the door. He calls his doula, who reminds him to wait until the pains are five minutes part before going to the maternity ward. The contractions progress with astonishing regularity; Eames had no idea any part of his body could work on such a strict schedule, really. But onwards they march: twenty minutes apart, narrowing to eighteen, sixteen, fifteen, twelve, ten. Eames hasn’t got any kind of appetite but he makes himself choke down a cup of tea, half a biscuit. Nine, nine, eight, eight, seven, six, and Eames has the phone ready to dial at five, doctor and then doula, and then doctor again because of course they had to page him, he wasn’t in.

“Oh, good, good,” says the doctor when he calls back and finds out that Eames is coming in, “if things go well I’ll even be the one to deliver tonight. I’m on call this week. How is the pain?”

“Oh, it’s not awful,” says Eames, though honestly the last two contractions weren’t a picnic, exactly. “I’ve a high pain threshold, I reckon.”

“That’s good news,” says the doctor with an amused undertone Eames doesn’t like. “Okay, we’ll see you soon, Tristan.”

Eames leans his forehead against the cool wood doorframe in the front entrance as he waits for the cab. He regrets the tea and the biscuit both, abruptly. He’s got a bad feeling that they’ll make a reappearance before long. Five minutes sounds like a good space of time when you just think about it objectively, and even longer when you’re accustomed to measuring dream work in such piddling real-time increments, but Eames is surprised to discover how five minutes collapse down to a scant handful of productive actions before he’s forced to stop in his tracks, grab the nearest surface, and concentrate on nothing more than breathing and staying upright and fighting a rising sense of panic because it keeps getting _worse_ and he’s still here at home, alone.

He hears the cab at the kerb at long last but it’s an ill-timed cab. It’s just going to have to wait for this pain to end before Eames can contemplate something so ambitious as opening the door and walking down the path to the car. The cabbie grows impatient; Eames can hear him coming up the walk, his step on the stairs. Eames is going to be cross with him because he’s an impertinent harassing sod who should learn that the client is always right, how _dare_ he be so bold as to key in the code for Eames’ front door, Eames will be out in just a moment, just as soon as he can stand upright, as soon as he stops cursing fluidly and creatively.

“Oh, you’re such an idiot,” says the cabbie, and hooks a forearm under Eames’ armpit, supports him as he gasps and half-whimpers. But the pain is ebbing at last, and Eames can breathe, and he can think, and he can abruptly wonder how the cabbie knows the code for Arthur’s state-of-the-art deadbolt. Eames can, in fact, take a slow inhale and recognize that scent as the same one that’s lingering in his bathroom down the hall.

“You’re meant to be halfway to Utah by now,” Eames says, pulling his head upright and turning to meet Arthur’s censorious gaze.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were in labour, dumbass?” Arthur demands.

“You had a flight to catch,” Eames replies, not in any mood to justify any of his choices. “What difference does it make? You were planning to leave anyway.”

“I thought you wanted me to,” Arthur snaps, scowling.

“I did want you to!” Eames says, seriously annoyed now, even though Arthur’s arm is a very nice thing to lean into.

“Well,” says Arthur, “I realized that I didn’t fucking care what you wanted, so — I came back.” He hesitates, shifts his gaze away and then back. “I didn’t want to miss this.”

“You didn’t miss it, yet,” Eames says, though it can’t be breaking news to Arthur at this juncture. He’s finally settled into the brief fallow period of clarity between contractions, and he’s able to shrug out of Arthur’s grip, straighten up and stand on his own. “If you _are_ here, though, it changes everything,” he points out. “I’m in no state to be reasonable, Arthur. Don’t make me be the reasonable one. I’m fresh out of reason.”

“Would you fucking shut up and let me do this,” Arthur says, exasperated. “Eames, just because you _can_ do this alone doesn’t mean you have to.”

“I was married, before,” Eames tells him, and though he didn’t mean to say it, though the words make Arthur draw up taut and serious and surprised, he keeps going, because five minutes isn’t long enough by half to tell this story properly. Eames is going to have to tell it quickly, instead. “We wanted kids. I mean, _I_ wanted kids. She — she wanted me to have what I wanted. But then I got the diagnosis, and she didn’t want to be a mum herself, and it broke us up, and it was all rubbish and awful and it changed everything about me.”

Arthur opens his mouth to interrupt; Eames hasn’t got time for it.

“So I moved on, right,” Eames says. “I got over it. Some things aren’t meant to be. Some people aren’t meant to”— 

—“I didn’t know you ever—“ Arthur blurts, but Eames rides over whatever else he wants to say.

“And that was fine,” Eames says. “It was fine, and I was happy, and if I couldn’t have exactly what I wanted I could at least enjoy what I had, and then — _this_ happened.” 

“Eames,” says Arthur, frowning, reaching out.

“No,” says Eames, turning his head aside, “It’s — it’s far better than I deserve, really, given all I’ve done. You’ve got to know when to, to walk away from the table, you can’t be greedy, Arthur, that’s what gets you fucking caught, that gets you nothing but a spoon digging in your slats on a dirty floor in fucking _Latvia_ while you call out for your”—

—“Hey, hey,” says Arthur, steady and strong and not swaying even a little as he opens his arms and Eames folds up against him, bending with pain, clean steady hard pain that drives out everything else. “Let’s get you to the hospital, okay? You can explain about how I remind you of the Baltic states once we get you a nice epidural and maybe some nitrous oxide.”

“Shut up,” Eames tells him, grating the words out, pressing his forehead into the flat planes of Arthur’s chest. “I don’t want an epidural. I don’t want any of that.”

“Okay, then, we’ll do whatever you do want,” says Arthur.

“I want you to fucking _shut up_ ,” Eames says, “and _leave_.”

“I can’t leave if you’re holding onto me like this,” Arthur says, obnoxious and pedantic as ever.

“I said _shut up_ ,” Eames says, because Arthur’s being remarkably thick on this point.

“Shutting up,” Arthur agrees, and strokes the back of Eames’ neck tentatively. “But I’m not leaving. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Still talking,” Eames answers through clenched teeth.

***

After a long series of horrible transitions — kerb to car, car to kerb, kerb to lift, lift to wheelchair, wheelchair back to his feet — Eames spends a long time walking in small endless circles in his hospital room. The world blooms out into light and sound between pains, and now and then Eames can swat his way through the consuming work of enduring the pain, he can get a message through to the outside world: _no drugs, no interventions, and for the love of all that’s holy, don’t make that sound with your lips when you breathe_. 

The rest of the time it’s like crawling half-paralyzed through a narrow space without much sense of how far he’s travelled or how far he’s yet to go. After a while his circles get tighter and smaller, his bit of linoleum tiled floor shrinks, and he balances with his face flat to the back of a handy chair while Arthur leans into his lower back and murmurs soft lovely things, while the doula (whom Eames has forbidden to touch him, he thinks) says _not much longer now, you’re almost there_.

“I’ve been almost there for hours,” Eames says, next time a nurse pops in to check. “I think I’m trapped in a warp bubble like on Star Trek.”

“Oh my god, you’re my favourite,” says Arthur, and dashes a pleased kiss against Eames’ sweaty temple even though Eames can’t work out why.

“Almost there,” says the nurse again with an encouraging if empty sort of smile.

“I’m asymptotically approaching birth,” Eames says, a bit wildly, clutching at Arthur’s shoulders.

“Seriously,” says Arthur, grinning properly now, “my absolute favourite. And, by the way, if you’re shitty at math then I’m straight.”

And that’s all there is before the pain comes back and Eames can’t make out Arthur’s reassurances through the fog around him.

“God, you look like shite,” Eames says, next time he’s clear-headed enough to see Arthur. Arthur’s pale and haggard and his ears are sticking out more than usual, the way they do when he’s gone too long without eating or sleeping. “What’s wrong with you?”

“I guess I’m having a sort of stressful day,” says Arthur, like he finds Eames’ question amusing somehow. “How about you? How’s yours so far?”

“Really fucking long,” Eames says. “Wait, is it still Monday?”

“Yeah,” says Arthur. “Christmas Eve, remember?”

“I’m not crawling through air ducts anymore,” Eames tells him. “I think I’m being pushed along unwilling. Or dragged by the arms. But the space is getting narrower. It’s a good thing I’m not claustrophobic.”

“Yeah, good thing,” says Arthur, and glances over at the machine that’s tracking Eames’ contractions. “Okay, here comes another one. Judy, get his back, I’ll stay here, he seems to want me here now.”

Pushed unwilling or pulled by the arms, seems an unimportant distinction. Eames is the camel going through the eye of a needle, either way. He’s a stalk of wheat pulled through a thresher. He’s a bit of kindling stuck on the blade of a hatchet, beaten to the splitting point. It’s much more violent than he’d guessed, labour, it’s more raw and physical and bare than thirty seconds squirming under the tender ministrations of a bit of cutlery in his side. Eames breathes and says sort of mad things and leans hard into the hands supporting him and then suddenly the pain sharpens to a keen point and Eames tumbles down towards it.

“Whoa, whoa, he’s bearing down,” says Judy in a voice that’s half panic, half excitement, “press the call button, we need —“

“Eames,” says Arthur, “ _Tristan_ , hang on, don’t push, we need to get you up onto the bed, dammit,” and Arthur’s _definitely_ excited, he’s laughing even if he sounds a little unhinged with it.

For a second as Eames settles onto the bed, he makes eye contact with Arthur — Arthur who still looks exhausted and worn and hungry, but who’s suddenly got that manic end-of-job aura of enthusiasm around him, too. “Fuck,” breathes Eames, moved by the sight of him, “I should have known it’d be you here with me at the bottom of bloody limbo. Where’s my totem?”

“You’re awake,” Arthur says, helping him get situated, managing the IV line and the leads from Eames’ fetal heart monitor with the same easy touch he uses to manage the PASIV spool. “This is happening.”

“Pain is in the mind,” Eames tells Arthur.

“Sometimes,” Arthur agrees, “but not right now.” He rubs his fingertips over Eames’ neck, perfect and firm and steady. “This is real.”

***

“It’d be funny if he came out brown-skinned after all this,” Eames says, a dozen or so pushes later, ecstatic and giddy with the release of being able to _do_ something beyond mere endurance.

“Oh, that’d be hilarious,” Arthur responds with arched brow, adjusting his grip on Eames’ hand, glancing down at the doctor seated between Eames’ thighs. Like Eames should have a sense of propriety at a moment like this.

“Well, I do have _so_ much unprotected sex, it’s impossible to keep track,” Eames says, “oh, oh, here’s another, mother _fucker_.”

***

And then:

“Told you it was real,” says Arthur, because he can do insufferable smugness better than anyone else in the world, even with eyes wide and grinning mouth and trembling reaching fingers tucking back damp tendrils of dark dark hair. “He’s real.”

“And he looks exactly like you, bloody hell,” Eames says, blinking, stunned at the resemblance: Arthur’s hairline, his frown, his eyes, his long narrow fingers. “I’ve just given birth to _you_.”

“Look at him,” Arthur exhales, “look at him. What the fuck — I mean, _holy shit_.”

“I’ll be sure to write those immortal words down for the baby book,” Eames says, amused, riding high on a glorious sense of accomplishment better than the end of the Fischer job, and not just because Cobb wasn’t involved this time. “Oh, look at his eyelashes, darling. Look at his wrists.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Arthur says eagerly, leaning in to see, “oh my god, how did you do this?”

“Photoshop,” Eames says, “very advanced photoshopping and,” he buries the rest in a series of kisses to the soft crown of the baby’s head because he’s just realized he hasn’t kissed him for at least a minute, possibly two. “I’m in love. Look at his pointy head. He looks like a weird alien. He’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’m in love.”

“You just said he looks exactly like me, and now you’re saying he’s the weirdest thing you’ve,” Arthur starts to point out, and then gets derailed when the baby latches onto the tip of his little finger. “Hi,” he says, gone breathless. “Hey.”

“What time is it?” asks Eames, glancing around, looking for a clock. “What day is it?”

“It’s just past five in the morning,” says Arthur. “Christmas Day.” He tugs his finger free and turns his head to look out the window, the darkness without, the dash of rain against glass. “Doesn’t feel like Christmas morning.”

“Yes, it does,” Eames replies fervently, kissing the little forehead again. “It feels exactly like Christmas morning.” The baby’s forehead wrinkles and his tiny fine dark brows furrow, and he’s delightfully, perfectly Arthur-en-petit. He looks like he’s going to start in questioning Eames’ every utterance any second. He needs a waistcoat and a crisp oxford with the sleeves shuttled up his little arms and a espresso cup of black coffee. A tiny moleskine and a mini-golf pencil. “I’m Bert, Bert, I haven’t a shirt,” Eames croons to him, beaming, waggling one of his little fists in the air, “but my people are well-off, you know.”

Arthur huffs out a sound midway between a laugh and a sigh, collapses down to sit on the edge of Eames’ bed. “Bert, huh?”

“Look at him,” Eames says, for what feels like the millionth time in Bert’s life thus far, “he’s clearly a Bert.”

“He is,” Arthur concedes with good grace. “Nice to meet you, Bert.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to anat for reading this over, and xen for poking me over and over until I finished this, finally. Shout-out to the immense transatlantic direct flight I took in June, during which I wrote quite a lot of mile-high porn. And thanks to everyone who's read along on this surprisingly protracted WIP.
> 
> At some point I will probably edit this whole thing properly; in the meantime I apologize for any inconsistencies in formatting between chapters. Hello, fic I wrote over the course of more than half a year. Hello.

Arthur’s been awake twenty-four hours, and though he hasn’t pushed a human being into the world like Eames has, he’s also not riding on a wave of endorphins and oxytocin. Eames was amazing, endured it all so stoically, but Arthur feels like he’s somehow labored with him, his body wrung out and weary from the endless torment of watching Eames suffer, not to mention the lack of sleep and food. 

Still, Arthur feels perfectly fine — if a bit bleary — until he goes to stand up. It’s then that the fatigue rolls up over him, his body sagging with the release of so many protracted hours of stress. Arthur stumbles a little as he straightens, but happily Eames is too busy trying to work out how to feed Bert, helped by one of the on-duty nurses, to notice Arthur’s state.

Sun’s nearly up, now, and it’s an hour later in Utah. Arthur goes to the family lounge down the hall and digs his phone out of his pocket, thankful he’d switched it off in a moment of clarity during yesterday’s long vigil of pain. The battery’s got enough charge that Arthur can place a call.

“Believe it or not, I was already awake,” says Lauren when she answers. “The kids were up at the crack of dawn. It’s just a sea of wrapping paper and toys, here.”

“I’m still sorry to call so early,” Arthur says. There’s no one else in the lounge. One corner of the room is given over to a preschool play area, board books and scatted duplo and puzzle pieces. Everything looks a little chewed up, used, battered. People do this again, Arthur realizes. They come back and do it all over again. “So, um, merry Christmas?”

“I know you didn’t call to say that,” Lauren says, the chirrupy sound of children’s voices in the background. “What’s going on, Joey? Are you — you’re okay, right?”

“I’m okay,” Arthur says, nodding, wandering over to look out the window at the slowly brightening sky, the starlit expanse choked out by buildings underneath and then mountains above them. He can see the points of artificial light that mark the top of Grouse Mountain. He’s heard that’s a good running trail. He might — he might find out, soon. “I do have some news.”

“Did you meet someone?” Lauren asks. “Are you bringing him home for Christmas? You can stay with us, you know.”

“I have a son,” Arthur says, simply. “He was born, oh, two hours ago, maybe. He’s —“ and Arthur struggles briefly for words, too tired to continue.

“Oh my god,” says Lauren, who never takes the lord’s name in vain, and definitely not in front of her kids. “You _what_?”

“Yeah,” says Arthur, “I’ll send a photo.” He pauses, realizing. “I haven’t taken a photo yet, shit.”

“Who’s the mother?” asks Lauren. “How long have you even — was this an accident? Did you know? Is that — this is the friend who was having a baby, right? Are you sure it’s yours? Oh my _god_ , Joey.”

Arthur laughs, dizzy and not a little drunk with exhaustion. “He’s mine. Trust me, you’ll know it when you see him. And — and the mother is”— Arthur stops, again at a loss. “His name is Tristan Eames. We met through work. We’re still — sorting it out. But he,” and Arthur shakes his head, remembering. “Wow, he was incredible. I was there for the whole thing. He’s amazing. He’s going to be the best mom.”

There’s a long pause during which Arthur can almost hear Lauren deciding not to ask everything that their parents are going to demand: are they going to get married, where are they going to live, how will they support themselves, will Arthur keep travelling for work, what will this Tristan do with his own career? She doesn’t ask any of the obvious questions, probably out of some sense that Arthur won’t have any of the answers. Instead, after long seconds pass, she says, “What’s his name? The baby, I mean?”

Arthur opens his mouth and closes it. “Bert,” he says. “Short for Albert. Albert Eames.”

“Bert,” says Lauren warmly. “How big?” She’s cueing him now, asking all the questions Arthur’s asked her by rote four times before.

“Seven pounds, eleven ounces,” Arthur says, grinning tiredly. “He’s got a weird pointy head. He’s really small.”

“I can’t wait to see him,” she answers, just like Arthur’s said four times before, twenty-four times all told, give or take a gendered pronoun. “Congratulations, Dad.”

“Oh my fucking god,” Arthur says, slapping a hand against his forehead. “I’m someone’s dad.”

“You’re someone’s dad,” Lauren says fondly. “Merry Christmas, little brother.”

* * *

“Sorry,” says Arthur, tucking himself up alongside Eames and the baby again. “I just had to call my family and tell them the news.”

“You left?” Eames asks, genuinely surprised. He didn’t notice; he’s been wrapped up in the weird miracle of breastfeeding, the surprisingly particular mechanics of the act, the marrow-deep sense of satisfaction when it all works perfectly and Eames is suddenly feeding his baby. “Well, do as you like, I’ve got a spare copy of you now.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” says Arthur, who is really quite alarmingly translucent at this point, purplish circles under his eyes and pale lips. “Is he — wow, so that’s how that works?”

“Apparently we’re naturals, he and I,” Eames says, not a little smugly, looking down at Bert curled close to his body, Bert’s enthusiastic small mouth and pleased sticking-out Arthurian fingers, his dark navy blue eyes and ferocious unrelenting frowning brows. “Who knew it would all be so simple after all my reading and fretting?”

“You’re good at everything on your first try,” Arthur says, yawning, tipping his head onto Eames’ shoulder. “Apparently that extends to childbirth and breastfeeding.”

“I’d do it again,” Eames agrees, “though I do think I won’t be quite so keen once this high wears off.” He looks away from Bert and back over at Arthur. “You need to eat something, darling, and go get some sleep. You look dreadful.”

“M’fine,” Arthur says, half-asleep already, mumbling.

“What did your family say?” Eames asks, just now working back round to what Arthur said. “Oh god, are they going to want to baptize all my family retroactively so they each get their own planet?”

“No,” says Arthur, “they know I’m hopeless, they’ve given up on me. In a very loving, smothering Latterday way.” He cracks his eyes open again and tilts half a grin at Eames. “You know Bert is the twenty-fifth grandchild for my parents?”

“Holy shit,” Eames says, stunned. “That’s — what? Twenty-five?”

“I’ve got six older sisters,” says Arthur tiredly. “And my eldest niece is getting married in the spring, so Bert here is going to be a — not uncle. What is it? First cousin once removed? Something. I’ll be a great-uncle anyway, soon enough.”

“That’s horrible,” Eames says, stroking Bert’s fat lovely cheek. “You’re definitely much more normal than I gave you credit for, if that’s your family.”

“Well,” says Arthur, “you’re the one who’s secretly been baby-starved your whole life. All these years as a forger in the underbelly of the criminal world, and the whole time you’ve been longing to stockpile onesies and brag about your kid’s Apgar score.”

“He was a perfect ten,” Eames says, not bothering to deny any of it. “Came out shrieking and pink as a seashell right to his toes, little sweetheart.”

“I was there, I know,” Arthur reminds him with a sloppy kiss to Eames’ temple. But when he settles back against the pillow, there’s a faint cloud on his brow that echoes Bert’s hungry frown. “Eames,” he begins, quietly.

“I know,” Eames says, looking away. “You were here for this part, and that’s marvellous. I want Bert to know you, that’s all. That’s — that’s not too much to ask, I think?”

“No, god,” Arthur assures him hastily. “Eames, I want — I definitely want that. Just. This was never in my plans.”

“I know,” Eames says, very gently. “How could I ask you to give up your best, happiest life when I’ve got mine right here in my arms?”

Arthur reaches over and tucks a little bit of Bert’s blanket in. “I do love you, Eames,” he says, matter-of-fact, sweet and soft. “I’ve loved you for a long time now.”

“I know,” Eames says again, watching the still marvellous effect of Arthur’s competent sure adult fingers moving next to this tiny replica of themselves.

“You did _not_ just Han Solo me,” Arthur says.

Eames only grins unrepentantly and strokes his free hand over the dark fuzzy point of Bert’s head. Arthur gives him a tight embrace that’s meant to be a reproach, kisses Eames’ temple and then goes boneless beside him as he drifts closer to a light doze. Within a few breaths, Arthur’s snoring quietly, his long narrow body half-off the bed but his arm secure around Eames and the baby.

“Little sweet Bert,” Eames says, watching the baby’s small mouth working, the noisy breathy swallowing, the pulse at the tender terrifying dip of his fontanelle. “You’re a wonder, do you know that? You weren’t ever meant to be.”

***

They put Arthur’s name — his real full name (which apparently is _Joseph_ , Eames learns to his unending delight) — as ‘father’ on Bert’s birth certificate, alongside Eames’ real-from-now-on Canadian name. Since Eames won the battle over Albert, he doesn’t begrudge Arthur the chance at choosing a middle name.

Arthur does Bert’s carseat buckle perfectly to the discharge nurse’s exacting standards. He hefts the carrier up off the floor and grins at Eames. “Albert Han Eames, ready to meet the world.”

“And you thought I was mad naming him after a Vaudeville song,” Eames says. He’s on his feet too, less wobbly than he expected, but aching and throbbing and puffy. Eames is generally, in fact, feeling like he expelled seven and a half pounds of baby just over twenty-four hours earlier. He’s not got his own body back, not by a long shot, but he can see his toes if he looks down, and no one’s feet are battering his liver. It’s a start.

“S’just a name,” says Arthur, all lightness and joy and good cheer. “A really awesome name.”

“If you say so,” Eames answers, buttoning his jacket: loose over his belly, still pulling a bit tight across the chest. His milk’s coming in, now. He’s going to need to buy all new clothes for this new shape. “Joey.”

***

It’s mad sleepless low-grade chaos, back home. Arthur’s a rock, he’s a lovely workhorse, he does the washing and cleaning and cooking and when Eames has a terrible series of hours in which he’s tired of being sore and swollen and overwrought, Arthur strokes his hair and his back and doesn’t try and take Bert from him, because Bert might be the source of Eames’ troubles but he’s also his best comfort, Bert’s heavy small body and his softly gurgling stomach and his sweet baby grunts. “I’m so tired of being tired,” Eames says, lying on his side on the couch because he still can’t sit up properly, six days later. “I’m tired of being sore. This is bloody hard work.”

“You can do it, though,” Arthur says, running his wide strong thumb up against the soft grain of Eames’ beard. “Remember when you forged that bond certificate in sixteen hours in Utrecht? That was totally awesome.”

“This is so much harder,” Eames says, Bert close to his chest. He’s embarrassingly close to tearing up even though all is well: Bert’s sleeping and fed, and Eames is on the road to recovery, and Arthur’s got chili on the stove and water boiling in the kettle for tea. It doesn’t help a bit to know that it’s mostly hormones, how Eames is feeling. It’s actually almost worse, knowing it: one more thing outside Eames’ control, the stupid unquenchable flood of oestrogen and oxytocin that’s making his brain fire on emotions before logic.

“Yeah, well,” is all Arthur’s response; that, and more soft gentle stroking of fingers on skin. “But, I mean, your tits look fucking amazing, so.”

Eames does finally cry a little, but he gets to cover it up with helpless giggles, and that’s better.

***

And then there are the witching hours, the dark-soaked in-between times when everything is still, and perfect, and quiet. Eames spends the long minutes staring into Bert’s dark eyes, and Bert stares back at him, and Eames’ head fills with wild speculation about this tiny stranger who’s put himself at the centre of Eames’ world. Who will he become? What does he feel and think? What will he live to see and know that’s beyond Eames’ wildest imaginings? What will he do to infuriate Eames? Whose heart will he break? Will he someday be sitting, as Eames is sitting, with a baby propped on his knee and the future blooming huge in his mind?

***

“That’s it, we’re going out,” says Arthur, and brooks no opposition. He packs for the expedition with his usual Arthurian efficiency. They’ll want for nothing with the nappy bag Arthur’s prepared. 

Eames, who can sit almost comfortably ten days after giving birth, fusses with the baby wrap and tries not to show how embarrassingly excited he is to leave the house now that Arthur’s put the idea in his head. They’ve been back and forth to the public health nurse’s office for weigh-ins, but not an expedition with no other purpose than to be out of the house.

They walk to the park, taking their time, and when they get there Eames sits on a bench and feeds the baby and feels gloriously, deliriously relieved to be a part of the world again. Arthur plays Angry Birds on his phone and finds a burp cloth in the nappy bag before Eames can ask for it. It’s all wonderfully mundane and perfect.

“I think I can do this,” Eames says, as they walk home again. Arthur’s holding Bert now, he’s got him cradled up against his shoulder and swaddled in blankets and a knitted hat that has an owl face on it. Bert’s sleeping and scowling as per usual. Eames loves him to distraction. “I might actually manage to do this, Arthur.”

“You’ve been doing it all along,” says Arthur with his usual calm pragmatism. “Dumb-ass.”

“God, I _am_ fond of you,” Eames says, bumping his shoulder into Arthur’s. “By which I mean to say, I don’t think I could have got this far without you. You’ve been perfect, darling.” He glances over at Arthur, feeling stupid that he hasn’t said it. “Thanks for — all of it.”

“Yeah,” says Arthur, as easily as though he’s handed Eames a pen instead of spending endless days making sure Eames doesn’t drop into madness from lack of sleep and a surfeit of maternal hormones. “No worries. He’s my baby, too.”

The fresh air’s done them all good. Bert’s right out, doesn’t stir when Arthur dares lay him down in his bassinet. Eames feels impossibly invigorated, alive, cheerful, and Arthur’s got no hesitations or objections whatsoever when Eames crowds him up against the wall and kisses him thoroughly. Eames is still too wound up with post-partum hormones to get very far with his own arousal, but it’s easy to jerk Arthur off, Arthur clutching at him fitfully like he’s been aching for it, coming swift and easy and sudden with his mouth open and gasping into Eames’. He eases down with lingering kisses and soft curious hands on Eames’ arse, his slowly-flattening belly, his heavy milk-tender breasts, his reflex erection. 

“How are you so fucking sexy all the time?” asks Arthur, smiling and breathless and handsy. “I never thought this stuff was hot, until it was you. God, you’re like — I’d fuck you right now if I could.”

“I beg of you to refrain,” says Eames, “but that feels nice, what you’re doing, god.”

And so they stay like that for a long time, trading kisses as Arthur feels Eames up with his big possessive hands and his twisty narrow hips. Finally Arthur sinks to his knees and sucks at Eames’ cock until Eames shudders though the faint echo of an orgasm with his fingers knotted in Arthur’s soft hair. 

“You should have a nap,” says Arthur afterwards, and Eames feels like he could get hard all over again from the very thought. Arthur laughs when Eames voices this notion, and dimples as he pushes Eames backwards down the corridor and into the bedroom.

***

Eames, who rarely watches television at all, has mainlined whole series in the four weeks since Bert arrived. He blames Arthur for setting up Netflix, as well as the long mindless hours of not sleeping because Bert’s not sleeping. Eames honestly has no idea what’s going on in most of the shows he watches, so he opts for the episodic procedurals as often as possible. His favourite is White Collar, because it has an irresistible combination of a shirtless fit model-type and one million opportunities per episode to shout at the screen about how they’re so _wrong_ , that’s not how forgery works, that’s not how that con works, that’d never — oh, for god’s _sake_ , as _if_ that secretary would hand over that address so easily, even to someone who looks like _that_.

“Maybe you should turn it off if it bugs you so much,” says Arthur, sitting up against the headboard with Eames’ head on one knee and Bert balanced belly-down along his other thigh. He’s patting Bert’s back and jostling him, angling for one last post-feed burp even though Bert isn’t having any of it, fussy and windmilling his limbs and too busy grousing to bring up anything. “Oh, right, because it’s _that_ simple to create a composite 3D image out of shitty low-res stills from closed circuit feeds.”

“Shh,” says Eames, “he’s got his shirt off again.”

Arthur sensibly doesn’t question the need for silence as they both take in the sight of Matt Bomer wandering topless around his set-perfect enormous Manhattan flat. Bert, less enchanted, draws his legs up and breaks the quiet with a resounding belch. “Oh, that’s my boy,” Arthur tells him, pleased, and gathers Bert up to turn him over, lift him and wipe his milky mouth, kiss his fattening cheeks and his pleasingly normal-shaped head with its dark downy fluff. “Daddy knew you had one more in there,” Arthur tells him smugly. “Daddy knew it, yes.”

“I do hope he’s inherited your unparalleled ability to gloat over petty triumphs,” Eames says, raising his head and smirking at Arthur. “It’s one of your most comely traits.”

“Mummy is just bitter because he was wrong, yes,” Arthur says, and wriggles his nose into Bert’s full taut belly. He pulls back, beaming, and then his leg goes tense and startled under Eames’ cheek. “Eames, Eames, he’s smiling at me, look!”

“It’s wind,” Eames says, but he sits up anyway, has a look. “Oh,” he says, seeing, “it’s not wind. Are you smiling at Daddy? Are you?”

“He’s smiling at me,” Arthur says, amazed. “Bert, you’re smiling at me.”

Eames pauses White Collar and settles in against Arthur’s side, because making Bert smile is far more interesting than even Matt Bomer’s bare chest. They take turns at it, and Bert obliges them over and over, like he hasn’t spent the first month of his life scowling continuously. He’s got faint proto-dimple dents framing his mouth, it turns out: one more way in which he is undeniably Arthur’s tiny clone.

Some time later Eames wakes, not sure when he drifted off. Arthur is climbing back into bed. He flings his arm and leg over Eames for warmth, burrowing in close. 

“S’he,” Eames asks blearily.

“Sleeping in the bassinet,” Arthur answers, not needing a translation. “Down for the count.”

Eames makes a noise of understanding and thinks idly about digging the iPad out from under his side. Somehow he fell asleep on it. It’ll probably be fine.

“Graham Heinz called today,” Arthur says.

Eames doesn’t stir, doesn’t react, but he’s instantly, painfully awake nonetheless.

“I had this one lined up before — before I knew about Bert,” Arthur says casually.

“When do you go?” Eames asks, matching Arthur’s tone.

“Not for a couple weeks,” Arthur says. “He has time to find another point, if.”

“No, no,” Eames says. “You’ve got work, of course you’ll go.”

“I don’t have to,” says Arthur.

“Yes, you do,” Eames answers. “I insist.”

“Yeah, I thought you might,” Arthur responds in a weirdly opaque voice. He tightens his one-armed embrace, turns his head and kisses Eames’ neck. “It’s good money, this job.”

“Hmm,” Eames says, “if you’re so eager to contribute financially I’ve got a few things here and there that could use fencing.”

“Yeah, sure,” says Arthur, thoughtfully. “I was going to set up an RESP with my cash payment from this job, but dodging Interpol and selling off all your priceless stolen artifacts, that works, too.”

“You’re such an arsehole,” Eames says, smiling in spite of himself.

“Just trying to be a responsible upstanding baby daddy,” Arthur says, defensively, but Eames can hear the answering grin in his voice. “I’m not the one planning to pay for college with stolen blood diamonds from the Congo”—

—“They’re Shang dynasty jade carvings, and maybe one forged Vermeer, don’t be melodramatic,” Eames says. “I’m cutting you off, no more homoerotic buddy cop procedurals for you, it’s warping your brain into thinking I’m some swashbuckling anti-hero with flexible personal ethics and a daddy complex.”

“But we haven’t even started in on Due South,” Arthur complains, laughing outright now. “Callum Keith Rennie!”

***

So Arthur goes, and it’s fine, it’s totally fine. Eames and Bert have a routine, now. They have all the neighbourhood mums battering down the door wanting a go at holding little Bert because he’s still got novelty on his side even if he’s officially lost his newborn status. Eames has season three of Bones (because he promised Arthur he’d save the rest of White Collar) and he’s got a stack of baby books to read. He’s fine, he’s totally fine.

* * *

Kluba, the extractor, goes shopping at Costco to stock up for the job. McFadden, their architect, hates it — no excuses to slope off in search of sustenance, nothing to do but sit his ass down and do the build. Arthur loves it for the same reason, loves the convenience of it. He drags an army surplus cot into the space and sleeps, works, eats, brews K-cup after K-cup because Kluba splurged on one of those single-serve machines and it’s not half-bad if you add enough cream and sugar.

He’s taking a break sometime on the third day, idly munching away as he scrolls through his RSS reader on his iPad with his non-sticky fingers. He doesn’t realize until he pulls the last bit of orange peel away: he’s done it in one piece.

“Elephant,” he says, flapping the orange-peel ears, the orange-peel trunk, in McFadden’s direction.

McFadden pulls the pencil out of his mouth and gives Arthur a steady bored look.

“Oh, come on,” Arthur says, and does a little trumpeting sound.

“You should go back to the hotel,” says Kluba. “Take the rest of the day.”

Arthur goes back to the hotel and takes the rest of the day. There’s a new batch of photos on Eames’ Facebook. Bert’s grinning, gummy, floppy. That dark straight hair he was born with is all but gone, but the dimples — but the dimples, god.

“By ‘day’,” says Kluba when Arthur comes back in around midnight, “I really meant to imply ‘and the night following’.”

“No, I’m good,” says Arthur, “I got those scans we were waiting on from the DMV registry office, so.”

* * *

Eames comes round the back way because he doesn’t like leaving the stroller out front. It’s pissing down rain as per fucking always in Vancouver but he’s got a zippy plastic cover over the pram and Bert seems oblivious to the rain speckles. He’s out cold in his little owl hat and the ridiculous oversized rainbow crocheted booties Arthur contributed. With luck he’ll stay asleep a little longer once they’re inside. There’s washing-up to do, and Eames wouldn’t say no to a quarter of an hour to read in blissful peace.

It takes him a minute to place what’s amiss in the kitchen as he enters, but then he blinks and realizes he’s got a shiny new appliance on the counter, something small and red and coy that really tells Eames everything he needs to know.

Bert doesn’t stir when Eames pops him out of his seat and tucks him up against his chest. It’s too quiet in the house — Arthur should have announced his presence by now. But no, here’s Arthur in the living room, sprawled out on the armchair, as dead to the world as his little son. He looks pale, trim, young. He needs a shave.

“What,” he says, starting a little as Eames settles Bert down onto his chest, “oh. Oh, hi, baby. Hi.”

“Shh, he’s out,” Eames says, helping Arthur get his arms sorted out until they’re secure around Bert’s back and bottom. “Why don’t you finish your kip together, I’ve got things to do.”

“He’s so much bigger,” Arthur says, “fuck.”

“I know, I know,” Eames agrees.

“Where’s his fucking hair,” Arthur says, stroking a hand over Bert’s poor bald head.

“Hey now,” Eames says, “I can’t keep track of everything.”

“God, he,” Arthur says, and presses his nose blissfully into the top of Bert’s scalp. “Hmm.”

Eames grins and kisses Arthur’s temple and leaves them cuddled up together. Does the washing-up and wipes the counters. Clears away a few layers of baby clutter from the table and pokes around in the fridge to see what there is for dinner. Comes back into the living room and finds Arthur exactly as he left him, awake and blissfully communing with Bert’s little heavy body, ardently and embarrassedly kissing his tiny spread-wing ears and his delicate faint brows.

“Thanks for the thing,” Eames says. “I’m sure it’s a wonderful — thing.”

“You need something to make decent coffee,” Arthur says.

“Can’t have coffee when I’m breastfeeding.”

“Well, it does tea,” Arthur says. “Herbal tea. Hot chocolate.” He clears his throat and resettles Bert in his arms. “Plus I’m here, and I drink coffee.”

“So you are,” Eames says. “So you do.”

***

Arthur leans back on his heels and his mouth drops open, wet and pink, eyes blinking heavily with pleasure.

“I don’t actually think this is what the doctor meant,” says Eames, skidding fingertips up Arthur’s thighs, grabbing hold, “when he said I could try penetrative sex again.”

“I missed you inside me,” says Arthur, unrepentant, working his hips down over and over, greedy and sweet.

“Absence makes the cock grow,” Eames quotes.

“Fonder,” Arthur says, “ah, fuck, and it’s ‘heart’.”

“I know what I said,” Eames answers, and pulls Arthur’s arse down harder.

* * *

Lucerne is fucking expensive. Arthur goes over the border a few times just to get lunch in Germany. He’s in line for what he hopes will be a latte, or something like a latte — _Milchkaffee, ohne Fett? Bitte?_ — and digging for euro notes among Swiss francs in his laptop satchel.

“ _Entschuldigungen Sie, bitte,_ ,” says the man behind him in the line, poking Arthur politely in the shoulder, and then he rattles off a string of German too fast for Arthur’s ear. It doesn’t matter — his intent is clear, because he’s holding out a pacifier pinched between index and middle finger. It’s got a cartoon frog on it, and flowers, and a fat bumblebee.

“Oh,” says Arthur, “how did — um, yeah, thanks. _Danke, ja, das ist —_ mine, I guess. Must have fallen out of my,” and he shuts up and takes it and hands the cashier a twenty euro note with the pacifier folded into the palm of his hand, embarrassing linty sticky rubber against his skin.

At least it didn’t happen at work. Fuck knows how it even — though yeah, Arthur spent most of his three weeks in Vancouver stuffing various baby accessories into every pocket on his person, lest they be caught short in Safeway or in the car. It’s actually a bit amazing he hasn’t found more detritus in his stuff. A little sock, or a bib, or that booger-sucker thing.

* * *

“Here, here, here,” Arthur says, slapping the thermometer into Eames’ hands, stopping him from more frantic digging in the drawer. “I took it out earlier, remember?”

“I wish you wouldn’t fucking move things,” Eames snaps, fumbling for the button as he hurries back over to Bert, Bert flat on his back in the middle of the steamy bathroom, Bert kicking his arms and legs and coughing, coughing, coughing.

If Arthur’s bothered by Eames’ tone he doesn’t show it, just arches an eloquent brow and switches the phone to his other ear. “His mom’s just taking it now,” he says, “hang on.”

Eames checks Bert’s temperature. “Thirty-eight point six,” he reports. “God, is that high? That seems high. Oh, my little sweetheart, Mummy’s got you, that’s it, cough it up.”

“Thirty-eight point six,” Arthur’s echoing, turning away a little but not leaving the bathroom. He looks damnably put together for someone pacing around a dark house in the middle of the night, for someone wearing a t-shirt and pyjama bottoms and nothing else. It’s oddly reassuring, Arthur looking like a magazine spread even as Eames’ heart pounds out of his chest from abject fear. “That’s definitely up from earlier.”

“Tell her he’s doing the — contracting — the thing,” Eames says, “he’s doing it again, he’s”—

“Yeah, he’s still showing some retractions in his belly when he’s recovering from a coughing spell,” says Arthur, frowning. “The cough sounds a little looser, I think. The steam, maybe — yeah. Well, we can try that next.” He’s nodding, then, and says _okay_ three or four times before he goes on to _thank you_ and _for sure_ and one last _okay_. He hangs up and looks over at Eames. “The HealthLink nurse said keep watching him and to try taking him out into the cool night air after this. If he gets worse we should take him to the emergency room but she says it’ll probably be better by morning.”

Eames strokes a hand over Bert’s warm forehead, beside himself with worry. “Is she sure? I mean, should we go now? Maybe we should go.”

“No, he sounds a little better from the steam,” says Arthur, steady and sure and calm. “Let’s wait and see. Emergency’s going to be a shitshow, this time of night, and it’s full of fucking diseased people.”

“That’s true,” Eames says, scooping Bert into his arms, kissing his cheeks, his neck, his ears. “Oh, baby love, I wish I could be sick for you, I’m so sorry you have to feel this way.”

Arthur perches against the bathroom counter and watches, dark eyes sparking with the sort of alert intelligence and competence that never failed to make Eames feel secure when he was going under on the job. It’s remarkable how well it works, even now.

Still —

“Do you think you could call your mum,” Eames says, helplessly.

“Yeah,” says Arthur, not hesitating, just starting to scroll through his contacts, “of course, I’ll call her right away.”

“Just — seven kids,” Eames says, “I reckon she’d know if”—

—“Hi, Mom, no, sorry, everyone’s fine but Bert’s got croup and Tristan wanted to know,” Arthur says, perfect fucking point man, best in the business, even at four in the morning, even slumped against a bathroom counter wearing a ratty BYU shirt and saggy plaid drawstring bottoms, thick ugly glasses. “Yeah, sure I can,” and he’s holding the phone out so his mum can hear Bert’s rattling little chest.

***

Morning comes and Bert sleeps: quiet and sweet, fever broken. Eames curls around him, somewhere between giddy relief and persistent grinding worry. Arthur, always sensible, is about two breaths away from unconsciousness, lying on the other side of the bed.

“Sorry,” says Eames, “I imagine this isn’t quite what you had in mind for your downtime between jobs.”

“Hm,” says Arthur sleepily, reaching over and squeezing Bert’s fat little foot. “I know how to get to Hawaii if that’s what I want.”

“I can understand it now,” Eames says, four of Bert’s little baby breaths later — Eames is still counting, neurotic mum that he is — “how things got the way they were with Cobb, I mean. In the end.”

“How much he wanted to get back to his kids?” Arthur asks, slurring now, bumping his index finger back and forth over Bert’s soft sweet toes, the little row of them like pink peas in a pod.

Eames pauses for a long time before answering. “No,” he says, finally, “I meant — how much he was relying on you. You’re a little too good at making yourself indispensable, my darling.”

Arthur’s only answer is a quiet snore on his next inhalation.

* * *

It’s April 25th; Arthur’s son is four months old today.

Four months old means Bert will start babbling soon, strings of nonsense syllables, repetitive little phonemes. It means he’ll be progressing with his hand-eye coordination, starting to use his fingers like a claw to rake toys closer to him, pulling things to his mouth to discover what they mean. Bert will be laughing and cooing, holding his head up consistently, pushing up onto his elbows and working on rolling front to back. He’ll respond to his name and he’ll know Eames’ voice, turn towards it.

Arthur’s son is four months old today; today might coincidentally be the day that Bert’s father dies in an incredibly stupid and probably preventable gun fight.

There are four ugly divots in the concrete over Arthur’s head, which makes two rounds left; the guy’s aim might not be much, but it’s improving with each shot. Arthur ponders his chances if he makes a break for the door twenty feet away. A moving target might be beyond this asshole’s capabilities; or possibly this is what he wants Arthur to believe.

He should go. He should try it.

Arthur draws his knees up instead, makes himself a smaller target. He shouldn’t be waiting on Jiang to come to his rescue. Jiang might have fucked off by now, Arthur has no business counting on him, that’s not how these things happen in their line of work, that’s not —

“You double-crossing motherfucker!” someone says, and then two rounds — different caliber, low and heavy and welcome — and finally, a meaty thump. “You fucking waste of our fucking time!” Jiang, for sure. Arthur exhales slow and shaky, unfolds his limbs, cautiously peers around the edge of the pillar where he’s been taking cover. Sure enough the goon is immobile, probably dead, and Jiang is standing over him looking supremely annoyed, gun still aimed downwards at the body.

“Thanks,” Arthur says, standing up, dusting off his jacket, shooting his cuffs. “He got the drop on me. My gun’s — well. He got the drop on me.”

“Just glad his aim was for shit,” Jiang says, kicking the body disdainfully. “I mean, I won’t be holding my breath waiting for my cut of the take. Pretty sure that’s not happening. Grant, you cheap little cunty fucker.”

Arthur comes over, jittery but determined not to show it. Dreamwork is supposed to inure you to this sort of thing, make you blasé. It’s years since he felt this — 

“What do you think?” says Jiang. “Walk away or go demand our payment?”

“Walk away,” Arthur says, automatically. “Just — fucking walk away.”

“I needed that money,” says Jiang. “Fuck. You know of any jobs going?”

“Nope,” says Arthur. “After this I’m due to sit on a beach for a while.”

“Well, you hear about anything,” says Jiang with a sigh. “Good luck, man. Say hi to the ocean for me.”

“Yeah,” says Arthur, “will do.”

* * *

“You know how to get to Hawaii, too, right?” Arthur’s voice is a bit wrong, somehow, gritty and tense and worn even over the phone.

“Is this the beginning of a joke?” Eames asks, easing Bert off and turning him round, getting him settled on Eames’ other side to feed. “It sounds like something out of the Beano annual. Is it like ‘how do you get to Carnegie Hall’?”

“Will you meet me there?” Arthur says on a tired little sigh. “I can get the tickets, just — can you come?”

Eames looks down at Bert — noisy and wiggly and busily sucking — then around the disaster area of the nursery. It’s been a mad couple of weeks since Arthur’s been away. The house is in chaos and Eames has a to-do list long as his arm: things that need fixing, calls Eames needs to make, new clothes for Bert because he’s growing like a weed and some more for Eames, because he’s too small now for his maternity gear and the wrong shape for his old pre-mum clothes. 

Hawaii would mean Bert needing a Canadian passport of his own — Eames will be damned if his son’s first travel document is a forgery — so there’s that whole worry and rush too. 

On the other hand: Hawaii. Arthur.

“Yeah, course we can,” Eames answers, already making a new list in his mind.

“Okay,” Arthur says. “I need a fucking vacation.”

“The Big Island, though,” Eames says, “and we get our own rental, not some horrible hotel.”

“As long as there’s a beach nearby,” says Arthur, “and some kona beans, I’ll arrange whatever you want.”

“Bad job, was it?” Eames asks.

“Hey, can you go on Skype?” Arthur says instead of answering. “I want to see him.”

“I can,” Eames says, “but be forewarned, he’s having his second breakfast.”

“That’s perfect,” says Arthur, unexpectedly. “Yes, please. See you in a minute.”

***

Arthur looks grim and grey at the Kailua-Kona airport, but then he catches sight of Bert with his miniature lei of purple flowers and abruptly his face comes over all soft and warm and fond. “Give him here,” Arthur says, snapping Bert out of Eames’ arms the instant he’s close enough. “Oh my god, he’s so big. He’s so bald.”

“And what am I, small and hairy?” Eames asks, slighted.

“Look at him smiling for me!” Arthur says, jogging Bert up and down, grinning hugely at him so they look like dimpled bookends. “Did you miss Daddy? Did you?” But before Eames can get too petulant, Arthur’s tipping Bert onto his shoulder and pulling Eames in for a kiss, too. “And yeah, you _are_ kinda small and hairy.” He scrapes his palm over Eames’ stubble, growing back in thicker than ever now that he’s mostly out of the postpartum hormone flood. Eames’ figure’s been permanently altered by motherhood, of course, but Eames thinks he’ll look decent in a bathing suit by now. Nursing has its calorie-burning advantages; Eames’ waistline is his own again even if his chest isn’t. His forgeries always looked smashing in a bikini top. If nothing else it’ll be interesting trying it out in his own skin.

“Better than the red one?” Eames asks later, knotting the halter, frowning at his reflection. This suit shows off his ink and his rather impressive tits, a little hard because it’s three hours now that Bert’s been napping off his jet lag and Eames is probably going to burst in a minute.

Arthur comes up behind Eames and gives him a critical once-over in the mirror, or what’s meant to look like a critical once-over. It’s a little difficult to believe when he’s also working a hand into Eames’ top and then tipping his face down to bite at the knot Eames just finished tying. “I should have gotten us a private beach,” he says, “I think I’d prefer you topless.”

“There goes your noble college fund planning,” Eames says, but he’s gone a little breathless himself in the interval. He’s missed Arthur touching him, god, Arthur palming him and it hurts, almost, it aches and prickles and — “Whoops, darling, sorry.”

Arthur makes a soft pleased sound and opens his mouth over the bump at the top of Eames’ spine, clearly not bothered by the way Eames’ breast has abruptly started leaking into his hand. “Does it feel nice,” he half-whispers, “or is it too weird?”

“It’s not the same as feeding him,” Eames reassures Arthur, “it’s a sort of crossed wire, maybe. Like pulling the fire alarm, my body’s just coming to battle stations.” He exhales hard, because the slip of Arthur’s skin is all the more exquisite now it’s warm and wet and slick against his nipple. “You’ll ruin this bikini top, take it off,” he warns.

“I love your fucking body,” Arthur says hotly, using his free hand to unknot the top properly, let it fall down to hang upside down around Eames’ chest. “You’re ripe, fuck, you’re just this — gorgeous lush —“ and he turns his hand, splays fingers wide and then closes them in, coaxing Eames’ milk down so it pearls and spills white over Arthur’s fingers and the webs between.

Eames looks in the mirror and can’t decide if he should get hard or pull Arthur round in front of him, tug his head down until the heavy bow of his lower lip can curve underneath and catch Eames’ nipple, god, he scarcely knows if he wants to fuck Arthur or cradle him, it’s — 

“It’s okay, darling, it’s okay now,” Eames says a little nonsensically, and Arthur, still hiding his face against Eames’ shoulder, makes a weird broken anxious noise. Whatever happened on the last job with Grant, it certainly wasn’t good. Eames reaches back and combs fingers through Arthur’s hair, tugs a little harder than he should. “Get on the bed,” he says, brooking no opposition.

Eames spreads Arthur out face-down, and fucks him like that, forearm pressing against the hard base of Arthur’s neck, Arthur gasping ecstatically into the pillow and lifting his arse into every thrust, Eames’ breasts leaking and leaking between them as they rut together. The ocean sighs out the window, breathing salt into the room from the open lannai. 

Bert sleeps and sleeps, and by the time he wakes, Eames has milk for him again, feeds him in an armchair in the corner while he watches Arthur rest, smiles small and relieved at the sprawl of Arthur, the way he’s echoing the sated splay of his son’s little body. It’s good, to have him here.

Even if only for a while.

* * *

“When it’s good, it’s amazing,” Arthur says two days later, halfway through his third cup of kona. It’s apropos nothing and could hypothetically be about the ocean, the weather, the beach, the coffee, the pineapple sliced on a plate between them.

None of those, of course, are what he’s talking about. Eames doesn’t need to be told as much, judging from the thoughtful way he nods and ticks an eyebrow in Arthur’s direction.

“When it’s bad,” Arthur says, and doesn’t finish. He doesn’t need to tell Eames, anyway. Eames knows.

Eames fiddles with the strap of his sundress. It’s weird, Arthur thinks, how Eames always forged women’s curvy bodies like it was nothing, and yet he still seems a little uneasy with his own new shape, unsettled by his skirt and the soft smocking of the bodice, the way the cotton cuts diagonally across ink that was never intended to curve over rounded skin.

“Do you miss it,” Arthur asks, not quite daring to make it a true interrogative.

“Yes,” says Eames, unabashed. “Every day. I feel a little mad with jealousy when I think about the fun you’re having while you’re away.”

“But you,” Arthur says, trying to get it right, “I mean, you’re sure that — it’s not like you’re.”

“I’ve had,” Eames says precisely, “three moments, exactly three thus far, when I’ve seriously considered dropping Bert at a neighbor’s house, driving to the airport, and never looking back.”

Arthur laughs and then stops, clocking the fact that Eames isn’t joking. “But,” he says, shocked.

“Clearly sense prevailed,” Eames says, gesturing over at their little son, busily batting at the stuffed toys hanging over his bouncy chair. “But they were each very bad moments, when I was in them.” He quirks his mouth and looks over at Arthur. “When it’s bad,” he says, and also doesn’t finish.

“But when it’s good,” Arthur concludes, and leaves it there, letting their conversation wash away with the receding tide. 

Bert’s got very little toes, little and rose-pink and curling, and sometimes when Arthur looks at them for too long he gets a heavy maudlin feeling. 

He doesn’t understand himself at all, sometimes.

* * *

It’s midsummer; long warm Canadian days are broken up by evening thunderstorms, every window thrown open to catch a breeze only to be slammed shut again when the clouds burst noisily above. Eames leaves a leeward pane open in the nursery, liking the smell of rain and the chatter of the leaves as they bounce raindrops back upwards. 

Bert’s just working out how to sit up and gets very fussy when he’s not allowed to practice — but Eames can be stern with him when he must, and just now he’s determined to be a disciplinarian. “Not now, you tetchy bugger,” Eames says to Bert, pressing his little squirmy body against Eames’ chest, horizontal whether he likes it or not. “It’s bedtime now, you can sit on your wobbly bum tomorrow.”

Bert arches his back and shrieks, indignant. His dummy tumbles from his mouth for the one billionth time in the last five minutes and Eames scowls and retrieves it, sucks it clean (it’s been a while since Eames hoovered, yes, god, the house is always half a disaster) and tries to stuff it back in Bert’s red yelling mouth. Bert will have none of it, turning his head away. He knows the dummy will make him sleepier, the crafty little beast that he is.

“No, too bad,” says Eames, “open up, in it goes. Mummy is taking a stand.”

Bert turns his head the other way, tears beginning in earnest now, little wet trails snaking down his bald temples and over his silly Arthurian ears.

“Oh, darling,” says Eames helplessly, “oh, love, what if Mummy fed you some more? I think we’ve got some milk still on the right side, would that be enough to settle you, my bratty boy?”

Bert’s getting too wise now he’s approaching the half-year mark, though. Eames doesn’t get much further than unbuttoning his shirt before Bert catches on and shrieks even louder. A bit desperate, Eames plunges a finger into Bert’s mouth, a trick that hasn’t really worked since the newborn days when Bert was tiny enough to be fooled into hoping that an index fingertip would be as comforting as a nipple, Arthur jamming his little mouth full while Eames fumbled his bra open, clumsy with the clasps in those early days.

Sure enough, Bert is completely unimpressed — but he clamps down on Eames’ finger for an instant.

“Ow!” Eames yelps, and pulls his hand away. “You bit me! You cheeky“— and then he realizes. “You bit me,” Eames says again, delighted, and pulls down Bert’s lower lip with his thumb. “Look at that,” he says. “My wee terrible jack-o-lantern. My vicious little bunny rabbit. And two at once, you tiny precocious shit.”

He takes a video for Arthur, who’s on a job somewhere on the east coast, hits send. Gingerly and with a new nervousness, Eames convinces Bert to nurse after all, but it’s — it’s okay, it’s fine so far — and better yet, it works its magic. Once Bert settles to the business of eating he gets in about a dozen noisy blissful sucks and then goes instantly to sleep, flushed with the upward tick of his metabolism.

Eames lays him down — in the crib since he’s outgrown the bassinet — and though he means to do the washing up and fold laundry and maybe check his email, he instead tumbles to the couch and cracks open a novel and reads by lamplight while the storm rages outside.

_Fuck it_ says the text from Arthur, when Eames finally gets off the couch to see why his phone was buzzing earlier.

_?_ says Eames, fairly certain this wasn’t meant for him. There’s no reply — middle of the night there, as here, but given Arthur’s working habits he’s as likely engrossed in research as he is to be sleeping.

***

“Thirteen letters, starts with ‘I’,” says Eames. “The clue is ‘without flagging’.”

“Indefatigable,” says Arthur, dropping his bag in the foyer. “Please tell me there’s still coffee from last month when I was here.”

“There’s still coffee from last month when you were here,” Eames agrees amiably as he pencils in Arthur’s answer and looks up to take Arthur in properly. “You look less fagged than you usually do after a job,” he observes. “Ariadne go easy on you?”

“I ditched Ariadne,” Arthur says, and lifts his hands away from his sides, palms out. “I ditched on the job.”

“Ah,” says Eames, “that explains why you’re here so early.” He sets the paper down and shifts over on the sofa. “Baby’s still asleep. Come give us a snog.”

“I ditched on the job,” Arthur says again. “I got your video and I — I just ditched.”

Eames wets his lips and looks at Arthur afresh, the slightly manic aura of him that Eames first mistook for being well-rested. Arthur is, in fact, terribly tired; he must have flown on a red-eye to get here so early in the day. But he’s giddy nonetheless, nearly bouncing forward onto the balls of his feet, dimples twitching in and out. “Because Bert bit me?” Eames checks. “That’s why?”

“Because he has teeth,” Arthur says. “Eames, _people_ have teeth. I mean. We both have teeth. Even if yours are all — you know,” and he makes a finger wiggling gesture that feels quite insulting given that it’s probably impossible to improvise a gesture for ‘wonky and British’. “We have teeth, Eames,” Arthur repeats, urgent.

Eames frowns and sits up a little. “Are you actually high? The only time I’ve seen you like this is when Yusuf put E in the mix to see what it did.”

“I’m not high,” Arthur says. “Eames, I thought — if getting shot at wasn’t enough to make me want to quit, then maybe nothing could. That seemed — I was pretty sure that was a sign.”

“Well,” says Eames, “I’m no psychologist”—

—“Yes, you are. You have a doctorate in developmental psychology,” Arthur points out, ever the bloody-minded stickler for details.

—“I know that,” says Eames, “it’s just an expression.”

“No, it’s not,” Arthur says.

“The point is,” Eames says, “you’ve always rather liked getting shot at. It’s getting hit that you hate.”

“Right,” says Arthur, startled and blinking. “Okay, but — _Dr._ Eames — why the fuck is it that I still didn’t want to give up dreamshare when I nearly died in a bad job, but seeing two little bitty white things sticking up out of Bert’s little gums — _people have teeth_ , Eames. Why the hell”—

Eames pats his knee in invitation.

Arthur gives him a darkly exasperated look.

Eames pats the sofa beside him instead, and this time Arthur comes as beckoned, settling stiffly next to Eames and then curving a hand around Eames’ thigh, pressing up against Eames’ side and making a quiet noise of dissatisfaction.

“Well,” says Eames, “if you want my clinical opinion — bearing in mind that my area is child psychology, and I’m not really licensed to shrink heads over the age of eighteen because you lot are all far too bollocksed up for my taste — bearing that in mind, I’d say that it’s probably a good sign that it’s not actually fear or danger that’s prodding you away from your profession of choice. I’d say it’s a rather healthy thing to want to be there for your child because you realize that he’s going to want to know you, not merely because you feel obliged to stay alive for his sake.” Eames curves a hand around the back of Arthur’s neck, stroking against the soft hair at his nape. “If,” he says, “if that’s indeed what you’re saying.”

“It’s not just that,” Arthur says. “I want to know _him_. He’s going to — get so big, so fast. He’s going to remember things, and think things, and feel things. I don’t want to miss that. I don’t want to wonder what his childhood is like, I want to”— and he turns his head quickly and meets Eames’ gaze, suddenly even more intense. “Fuck,” he says, “I probably should have opened with this part — the part where I love you. I love you and it sucks to be away from you and I haven’t fucked anyone else in months, I don’t want to fuck anyone else, I — I think even if it weren’t for Bert — I would still”—

—and Eames stops Arthur’s mouth up with a kiss, feels Arthur calm palpably under Eames’ lips, as Eames gathers him a little closer and urges him to unwind into Eames’ arms. “We’re not a package deal,” says Eames against Arthur’s mouth when they come up for air. “You don’t have to shag me to have him.”

“I know,” Arthur says, “but, I mean, how awesome would it be if I got to be Bert’s dad and sleep with his mom too?” He grins, loopy and fond, and kisses Eames again. “Can I fuck you,” he half-asks, “can I fuck you right here, god, I love it when you let me bend you over the arm of a couch, you and your sexy”—

—“If you don’t say ‘teeth’ we’re going to have words about it later,” Eames breaks in, teasing. “But yes, darling, I will gladly let you fuck me over the arm of the couch just as soon as you — can you just —“

Arthur’s answering smile is broad and delicious and slow-curving. “Eames,” he says, “ _Tristan._ Are you asking me for a little specificity?”

Eames laughs helplessly, nodding, already taking Arthur’s tie off, unbuttoning his shirt.

“Okay then,” agrees Arthur, “okay. I think you might have something I want.”

Eames parts the sides of Arthur’s shirt before tugging his own t-shirt off, reaching behind to unclasp his bra and shrug it down his arms while Arthur kneads at his biceps hungrily. “Do go on,” Eames says. “Tell me what I have that you want — I hope it’s my fantastic rack.”

“I think,” Arthur says, and pauses long enough to fall back onto the couch and drag Eames over him, arch up and brush his mouth over Eames’ shoulders and arms and chest. “I think you have my best — the life that I — god, I can’t think when your boobs are in my face,” and he wriggles up higher and dimples at Eames. “I want this life with you,” he says, simply. “Will you let me in?”

Eames looks down at Arthur. “Darling,” he says, “I’ve never gotten round to shutting you out. I couldn’t.”

They stare at each other, grinning stupidly, for about half a minute, and then Eames bursts out laughing and drops his weight down onto Arthur, kissing his stupid lovely mouth and digging fingers into his narrow muscled sides. “Just one more thing,” says Arthur, between kisses.

“Mm,” says Eames, not really caring, ready to agree to whatever condition Arthur’s setting.

“If I’m going to bend you over the arm of the couch you have to let me be on top,” Arthur says.

“You really have quite a brilliant mind for logistics,” says Eames in admiration. “Right you are.”

They could take it slow, probably, but they don’t. Eames is frantic to get Arthur inside him and Arthur seems equally frantic to be there, and once he’s fucking Eames they go a little mad with it, slick skin and filthy words and hard insistent thrusts, Arthur’s thumbs holding Eames open so he can watch better, see where they’re joined. 

For his part Eames buries his face in his forearm and braces back into Arthur’s hips and tries not to come too soon because — well, because these days Bert’s eating strained peas, and that means less nursing and fewer hormones, and that, in turn, means that Eames’ long-absent ejaculatory reflex has been clicking online more and more often, more and more spectacularly, and oh — oh — he’s going to come, come wet and probably embarrassingly copiously, and Arthur knows it, damn him. Arthur goes up on one knee and pulls Eames’ arse up to him so Eames is at a ridiculous and perfect angle and Arthur just — god — fucks him and fucks him, grunting and swearing and only letting up long enough to give Eames’ arse a slap now and then.

“You’re going to wake the baby,” Arthur says, “bite a pillow, jesus,” and Eames bites the upholstery and laughs a little hysterically and then comes hard the instant Arthur wraps a loose fist around him. “Oh, fuck, Eames,” Arthur says, impressed in spite of himself, and he palms Eames’ belly with a slippery smeary hand to hold him up a little longer so Arthur can work fast and deep and abruptly purposeful. Arthur grinds out a half-shout — _who’s loud now?_ Eames is too dazed and blissful to say — and spills into Eames, curling his hips upwards in a series of hungry little thrusts, deep as he can go and drawing it out long as possible.

“Shit,” says Eames, tensing up some seconds or minutes later. He pushes up off the couch and Arthur mumbles a vague sound of protest as he lists helplessly off Eames’ sweaty back.

“You have supersonic mom hearing,” Arthur says, impressed, “I can’t hear him crying at all.”

“He’s not,” Eames says, wriggling so that Arthur slips free, very wet and very bare. “Arthur, fuck.” He feels Arthur’s come slick down his inner thighs, which normally — but — “Arthur.”

“Hm,” says Arthur, still smiling dreamily, lounging back over the couch and reaching a lazy hand to touch all the white-clear patches over Eames’ belly and chest. “Wow, did you always shoot like this or”—

—“Arthur,” says Eames again, a little more urgently. “You didn’t use a condom?”

“No,” says Arthur, and he sits up taller. “Is this — I mean — wait, have you been”—

—“No,” says Eames, shaking his head hurriedly. “No, I’ve not fucked anyone else, darling, just — well. I’m still breastfeeding. We’re probably all right. I think it’s fine.”

“You,” Arthur says, and then he blinks, getting it. “Oh,” he says. “Wait. I thought you — but I mean, obviously.” He pauses and gestures at Eames. “So the whole — anovulatory — thing.”

“My doctor did a few tests,” says Eames. “I don’t know if it was a misdiagnosis originally or if Yusuf’s mix did something, but apparently I’m all systems go now.” He hesitates. “But men tend not to ovulate when they’re nursing. Probably it’s fine. Just — next time we’ll use something, and maybe I’ll go on the pill to be sure.”

Arthur sags against the couch and utters a couple of helpless giggles. “Oh my god, can you imagine, though? That would be ridiculous.”

“Completely mad,” Eames agrees, grinning too. He’s back to disbelief — that he gets this, he gets _Arthur_. That Arthur’s sure. God. He glances down, seeking proof that he’s here, that it’s real, even though he hasn’t touched his totem in months. “Good lord, there’s jizz on my collarbone,” he says, amazed.

“You’re welcome,” says Arthur proudly. “Lucky you, you’re shacking up with an amazing lay.”

“That’s a beautiful sentiment, that is,” Eames tells him. “An amazing lay and a properly romantic soul.”

Arthur chuckles quietly and then heaves himself off the couch, groaning quietly.

“Off to have a kip?” Eames asks, because suddenly it’s obvious that Arthur’s exhausted, that he flew all night fuelled by nerves and coffee and little else.

“I just want to pop in and say hello, first,” Arthur says, and though his ears turn quite pink he didn’t bother apologising for this display of vulnerability. “I need to tell him that I’m not going away to work anymore.”

“Quite right,” Eames says. “Don’t wake him up, though, I’ll murder you.”

“Noted,” says Arthur, and ducks back in for a kiss before he dons his shirt and underwear and heads for the nursery with his light point-man’s step.

* * *

_Epilogue_

“Mail,” says Arthur, coming back from the front door. Eames is spooning yams into Bert’s mouth. Bert seems delighted, even though he’s mostly just spitting them back down his chin as fast as Eames can get them in. “Are we expecting a parcel?”

“Your mum was going to send those bibs she found,” Eames says. “The big ones.”

“It’s not from my mom,” Arthur says, pulling at the brown paper. “No return address but the postage is Canadian.”

“Who do we know in Canada?” asks Eames distractedly. “Yum, yum, yes! You want more?”

“At last count? We know _everyone_ in Canada,” Arthur says. “You have met all the Canadians and they all want to babysit.”

“Don’t be antisocial,” Eames says, “you should be glad we have friendly neighbors.”

Arthur ignores this in favor of opening the cardboard box. There’s a card nestled within layers of packing peanuts — but it’s not an ordinary card. Arthur opens it up: no words, no colours, but someone has made a folding three-dimensional model of the Penrose steps, or the dream version thereof. “Ariadne sends her congratulations,” he tells Eames, showing him.

“That nosy little bird,” says Eames, all fondness. “Isn’t she clever? I suppose that means she’s forgiven you?”

“I guess,” Arthur agrees, smiling in spite of himself. It’s intricate work, must have taken her hours. He has to remember to put it away before Bert gets his sticky hands on it. Having discovered solids, Bert is lately convinced that every foreign object should be tested for nutritional potential — feathers, bugs, newsprint, it’s all fed directly into his mouth.

“Hmm,” says Eames, pleased. “Oh, yes, it’s good, it’s num-num, isn’t it?”

“It doesn’t look that num-num,” Arthur says, but he comes close enough to kiss the downy ringlets finally beginning to spring up from the crown of Bert's head, blond and fly-away. He moves over to Eames next, but gives this kiss a different intent, placing it at the juncture of neck and shoulder, exhaling gently to raise a shiver.

“Careful,” says Eames.

“You can’t get _more_ pregnant,” says Arthur. “Even you, Fertile Myrtle.”

“I think we both know that it’s your mutant Mormon spermatazoa that are to blame,” Eames says, as he always does. “Mind the tits, they’re sore.”

“It was only the one time,” Arthur sighs, as he always does. “You barely ever bottom, even.”

“Once is all it takes,” says Eames, with his own usual hint of smugness, because Eames never expected to be pregnant once, after all. He’s obviously quite pleased to have managed it a second time, even if it was sort of accidental. “And don’t start in about keeping better track of my cycles, you’re the one who didn’t let me get through one before you got me in the family way again.”

“After this I’m getting you an app for your phone,” Arthur promises. “And a shit-ton of condoms.”

Eames dips a finger in the yam puree and smears it on Arthur’s face, cheerful and horrible as ever.

* * *

They’ve got a family bed, mostly because Bert will sleep through the night if he’s bracketed by his mum and dad, and Arthur and Eames have discovered they will make any number of parenting compromises for the sake of more than five hours of continuous sleep. Eames grouses about it, and so does Arthur, but most nights they sleep with one hand on Bert’s little fleecy-warm back, curl hungrily around his soft milky exhalations, and wake up gathering him in, kissing the riotous blonde curls that halo his head.

“Watch this,” says Eames, one night before they’ve quite nodded off, but with Bert snoring quietly between them. Eames tugs the hem of his shirt up and rolls onto his back. The position is dead uncomfortable but it makes it easier to see: the sudden weird ripple of movement as Leapfrog the Sprog (named for the position in which he was conceived, naturally) protests the shift in position.

“Oh my god,” says Arthur. “That’s revolting.”

“I know you meant to say miraculous,” Eames answers, transfixed. “Look, that’s his foot. Hi, Froggy, it’s Mummy.”

“One time I saw a guy turn inside out in the dreamscape,” says Arthur. “This is more unsettling. Can I stop watching now?”

“You like my being up the spout well enough when it comes to the boner that won’t quit,” Eames reminds him. Leapfrog does a froggy sort of stretch and Eames’ belly heaves side to side.

“Bwuh,” says Arthur thickly, and drops back onto the mattress, pulls a pillow over his face. “This is like sharing a bed with an incubating face-hugger from Alien. I’m gonna puke.”

“It’s a miracle,” says Eames, watching Froggy heave the other way. “It’s a bloody miracle, darling.” And Arthur groans pathetically from under the pillow. Bert sighs and flings out an arm that punches Eames squarely in one hypersensitive breast. All Froggy’s kicking has Eames’ belly answering with another of the slow but insistent Braxton-Hicks contractions that have been picking up steam the last few days. It won’t be long until Eames is back in that place of blinding awful pain, back in the endless maze of tunnels more terrifying and inescapable than the cleverest dreamscape. But at the end of that, at the end, there will be another person who will someday lie between them too.

And it _is_ a bloody miracle. It is.

**Author's Note:**

> Notes on the biology of it all:
> 
> In this 'verse, both men and women are capable of both insemination and gestation. This means that same-sex couples can get each other pregnant, and that women can get men pregnant. Gestation and birth, however, have historically been considered 'women's work' much in the same way as our world has historically thought of childrearing, housework, etc. Gender equality has changed a lot of this and most modern people consider it fine, if not quite 100% common, for married partners to take turns having the babies. It promotes equality between spouses and encourages the children to bond equally with both parents, etc etc. More conservative thinkers frown on gay couples having babies just as they frown on same-sex marriage or stay-at-home dads in our own world. Xen posits, also, that this has an historical impact on royalty and succession, in that patriarchal lineages would rely on men to bear their heir rather than women. (I suggested this would lead to a lot of feminists complaining that Prince William is getting WAY too much attention for his pregnancy, it's not amazing just because he's a MAN for fuck's sake.)
> 
> Biologically, then, everyone has a secondary sex and reproductive system. It's probably an evolutionary adaptation that arose to counterbalance the danger of small populations losing genetic viability and diversity or something like that. Men and women can both take hormonal contraception to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Children refer to their gestational parent as 'mom' or 'mum' regardless of gender, and likewise call the other parent 'dad' regardless of gender. Because I'm essentially a bit of a cynic, this has no far-reaching implications for the ways this culture differs from ours. There's still sexism, homophobia, and patriarchy. Sorry, everyone, but it makes sense to me that there would be.
> 
> And if I can put my half-a-biology-degree to work here, I'll mention too that if you know your X and Y chromosomes and your Punnett squares, you can work out that a lesbian same-sex couple would only be able to bear female (XX) children without outside intervention. Assuming male biology has some way of weeding out non-viable YY zygotes, male same-sex couples would actually have a 2:1 ratio of male:female babies, i.e. twice as likely to have a boy as a girl. Interesting, no? Probably a terrible plan in terms of evolution but then, if everyone can have babies with everyone else, it hardly matters I guess.
> 
> In conclusion, this all sounds slightly insane when I write it out but THERE YOU HAVE IT.


End file.
